Moans, bones and Cobblestones: A Summer in Italy

I wanted to enter this article in a travel writing competition, but the competition does not permit previously published articles and this one appeared in a 2012 Activate. I thought I would post it here instead: 

By the middle of my trip to Italy, I was sick, tired, and my ankle looked like an angry blue puffer fish. I had seen the wonders of Rome, stared in awe at the wastes of Pompeii and when I arrived in Naples – and I fell prey to swarms of gnats, a selfish Argentine and the common cold.

A sort of inertia, enflamed by travel fatigue and the various irritants of Italy’s most controversial city, overcame me. My ankle made me loath to walk. Our room was such a bright orange and so hot that, in my more dramatic moments, I swore I was burning in hell. Bitter thoughts turned on the amount of money I was spending, and I started wondering whether saving up a year’s salary for my Italy trip-of-a-lifetime had been worth it.

The answer is, of course, a resounding affirmative.

The Trevi Fountain - photos by yours truly

My trip started with a few days in the Netherlands, where I met up with my sister before we departed for Rome. What followed were 17 days of a self-indulgent, ruin-packed tour that I had agonized over for months – it was a dream come true. We began in Rome, swept down to the ruins of Pompeii, festered in the bowels of Naples and then traipsed up to Tuscany, where a sunset watched through the green shutters of a Tuscan villa restored my wanderlust.

My hate for Naples is somewhat unfair, but due to a confluence of unfortunate and unexpected events, I abhorred the very air of the place – the hot, gnat-filled night air.

When I started my trip, I was armed with a piece of canonical travelling wisdom: things will go wrong. I knew this, and adjusted my expectations accordingly. I knew that I would get sick. I anticipated food poisoning. I was even 100% percent sure I would twist my ankle somewhere along the way.

What I, stupidly, did not anticipate was snoring, the Argentine and weird European toilets.

Being young and not even modestly rich, we stayed in hostels for most of our trip. It was amazing to see the national stereotypes come to life as travelers came and went. I must say, however, that I am not stereotyping the Argentine based on nation. I call him the Argentine simply because that was the only fact we could exchange between his broken English and my single-word Spanish. “Hola!” only gets you so far.

This Argentine is perhaps the foremost factor in my bad experience of Naples. In the eight bed mixed dorm room we shared with him, he was hated by seven others. He treated that crowded orange room as though it were his own. While the rest of us toiled in fitful, sweaty sleep, he would switch off our air-conditioning. Naples in the middle of July reaches the high 30s, and doesn’t cool down at night. Imagine eight people in a tiny, ranging on dilapidated room in 38 degree (C) heat and no air conditioning, fan or airflow.

And then there is the snoring. I was not aware of how many people suffer from this affliction. I met the nicest Canadian girl on our first night in Rome. We chatted about the weather, our travel plans, our countries. When she turned in, my sister and I agreed that she seemed exceedingly pleasant.

And then she fell asleep.

Whereas men snore with a loud and pronounced hack, hers was the continual scrape of a saw over glass. Unsurprisingly, the Argentine’s snores. He brayed like a donkey, and on the night his friend shared our room, they snored in chorus.

The toilets... I won’t go into. Suffice to say that, in South Africa, we’re used to them being designed without holes in strange places that serve no discernible purpose.

But, for all my complaining, it did actually turn out to be the expected trip of a lifetime. Once I got some solid sleep, medicine for my cold and ice for my ankle, my enchantment with Italy resumed.

The Roman Skyline

Barberini Fountain in Rome

Rome is beautiful, crowded, crumbling and ever in repair. Magnificence does not begin to describe the Eternal City. But for all the glory of St Peter’s Basilica and the Colosseum, my favorite site was a small monastery on the Via Veneto – what used to be Rome’s swankiest street in the La Dolce Vita days.

This Monastery – Il Convento dei Cappuccini – contains six crypts that are decorated by the remains of over 4000 Capuchin monks. No one is completely sure what drove one of their brothers to liven up the crypts with installations such as “The crypt of Shin-bones and Thigh-bones”, but his interior-decorating has attracted such visitors as the Marquis de Sade and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first crypt – “of the Three Skeletons” – contains an epigraph that reads: “What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be” in three different languages.

Inside the Colosseum 

View from St Peter's Basilica's Duomo

Wonderful little panini joint outside The Vatican's walls

Pompeii cannot be described to the uninitiated. The paradoxical wonder of history captured in a moment of abject terror is something that should be experienced to appreciate. You have to stand over the screaming, smiling and choking casts of people long decayed to get a sense of their terror, and their significance.

Memento mori: one of Pompeii's famous casts

Gate to one of Pompeii's three Necropoli

Naples did have its charms

Once we moved on from Naples, Tuscany recaptured my exhausted imagination. It is a different world: Rome, Pompeii and Naples all have stronger ties to the ancient. Tuscany is art, countryside and the pastoral personified. Walled cities, rolling hills, 18^th Century Villas with antique furniture, creaking floorboards and dark hallways fulfilled all my time-travel fantasies. We got up at five in the morning to see the sun rise over the hills outside Sienna. In Lucca, we followed a medieval parade and watched a cross-bow contest.  In Florence, I slowly circled David and guiltily admired his bum.

It was worth a year’s toil. Expectations were met, disappointed and dashed. I marveled at the majesty of Rome and Tuscany, felt bitterly aghast in Naples and it only took me 15 minutes on the cobblestones of Pompeii to twist my ankle.

The Tuscan landscape as seen from our Villa's backyard

Farm implements on the hill

In Siena

Flag throwing in Lucca during the Medieval parade