Rome trip report

[lethargic_man]

I went to Rome the week before Rosh Hashana. I intended to write a trip report at the time, before I forgot it all, but I've been so incredibly busy this has been the first chance I've got.

It says in the Talmud, "Ten parts of wealth were given to the world; nine were taken by Rome and one by the rest of the world". Looking at the sumptuousness and opulence of the city, it would appear that to an extent that is true even today.

Rome is steeped in its history, to the extent that even the manhole covers have SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus) stamped on them, which amused me every time I saw it.

I started my sightseeing at the main synagogue, the Tempio Maggiore. As all of the synagogues in Rome—and indeed the whole of Italy—are Orthodox, I was astonished to learn it had this name: I associate the use of "temple" for "synagogue" with the American Reform movement, which uses it to indicate that it has rejected the traditional Jewish yearning for the Temple to rebuilt in Jerusalem (and the use of which makes me cringe every time I hear it). Yet all the synagogues in Rome are referred to as temples.

The synagogue is vast, and incredibly sumptuous: in a city brimming with beautiful churches and other buildings, the Jews of Rome did not want to be left out! The synagogue practices the Roman rite, which I encountered and blogged about at the Roman shul in Jerusalem two years ago, which is neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, but something different again. However, one does not in Rome become a member of an Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Roman shul; instead one joins the Roman community as a whole, and then can attend whichever synagogue one wishes.

This was one of a number of ways in which the Roman Jewish community surprised me. In the evening my friend Mindy took me to one of the kosher restaurants in the Jewish quarter (which, to the embarrassment of all newcomers they insist on calling the Ghetto, since that was where the ghetto stood). It looked pretty frum, with not only the words for עַל נְטִילַת יָדַיִם painted on the wall, but a שִׁוִיתי hanging on the wall; but to my surprise I was the only person there wearing a capel. That would never be the case in a kosher restaurant in London!

Indeed, apparently half the diners there were probably not Jewish, Mindy said: In the same way people here go for an Indian or a Chinese, in Rome people in general will sometimes go for "a kosher".

Aside from the shul, I suppose the main sites of Jewish interest in Rome are the Colosseum and the Arch of Titus. The Colosseum was built on the proceeds of the booty from the suppression of the First Judaean Revolt, the looting of Jerusalem and the enslaving of much of the population of Judaea. (Yes, that's my ancestor's we're talking about.) Which made it a bit of a surprise to walk in there and discover a large crucifix facing one as one exited the vomitorium. Apparently the Colosseum has become a monument to the Christians that died in gladiatorial contests... despite the lack of evidence for Christians ever being martyred there. (Elsewhere in Rome, yes, but not there.)

As for the Arch of Titus, this was infamously erected to celebrate the crushing of the revolt in Judaea. I had considered spitting at it when I finally saw it. In the end, I decided there was no need: my mere presence there was a more fitting revenge. You're dead, I thought to Titus, your family went extinct with your brother, and your empire died in 1453. But I'm still here, me and another thirteen million like me.

As a cohen, I can't go under the same roof as a dead body, which, due to the odious Christian practice of interring their dead inside their places of worship, ruled out the city's many churches for me; and also the Roman buildings remaining in the finest condition today: those that had been converted sixteen hundred odd years ago into churches. In particular, I was disappointed not to be able go to into the Pantheon, which contains the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. Fortunately, though, there was a room in the Vatican Museums constructed as a scaled-down replica of the Pantheon dome.

In that same room, I saw a statue of the emperor Claudius; I have to confess my first reaction was: "But he looks nothing like Derek Jacoby!"

The Vatican Museums contained a frankly ridiculous amount of sumptuous art, of which the Sistine Chapel is only the tip of the iceberg. There are rooms upon rooms with paintings by the likes of Raphael and Michelangelo on the walls and the ceiling, and to my delight, even a room with maps of all of Italy on the walls. ("Can you spot what's wrong with this map of Sicily?" I overheard a tour guide saying as I passed, grinning to my self as I'd instantly spotted what it took his group a while to realise: the map had south at the top for some reason.)

I was most surprised to find flash photography permitted both in the Vatican Museums and on open-air ancient Roman frescos in Ostia (see below). Surely thousands of tourists taking flash photos day after day are going to vastly accelerate the fading of everything from mediaeval paintings to ancient Egyptian artefacts?

In four days, of course, I could only scratch the surface of what there is to see in Rome; I'm not going to blog about all the most famous things here, as it would take all day, and many of you will have seen these sights yourselves. But I will mention a few of the lesser-known sights in Rome, which I would not have seen had I not had a "native" guide (Mindy).

For example, the unusual perspective effect visible on Via Niccolò Piccolomini: From one end of the street you can see the dome of St Peters framed by the trees at the other end; it looks quite close, like it's not far beyond the end of the street. But as you drive down the street towards it, the trees open out away from it, and St Peters appears to shrink, so that by the time you reach the far end, St Peters appears much further away than when you started, even though you're actually a bit closer to it. (It's still a mile or two away.) I found a video of this effect on YouTube, though it's not so apparent there, partly because it's shot at night.

The effect, it strikes me, offers striking validation of the reason the Moon can seem large when it's near the horizon: near the horizon the moon (or St Peters) is surrounded by objects which appear small because of the distance, making it (or St Peters) appear large by contrast. Mindy drove me up and down the street several times so I could appreciate the effect. :o)

Another little sight Mindy introduced me to was that through the keyhole of the gate of the villa of the Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem on the Aventine Hill (it's in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta if you want to go there yourself). Looking through the keyhole yields a perfectly aligned sight of the dome of St Peters several miles away, framed by trees. It's an impressive piece of viewpoint planning.

As well as looking around Rome, I paid a visit to Ostia, which is the ancient port of Rome. It was excavated in the 1930s, and is, I'm told, in a comparable state of preservation to Herculaneum.

Here's a picture of me investigating whether this Ostia-path suffers from Ostia-porosis:

Ostia is big; it takes a whole day to look around it. As well as the obvious theatre, forum, baths, etc, it's got lots of religious buildings, both of the ancient Roman paganism, and of the eastern cults and sects that became popular in the third century such as Mithraism and Serapis-worship; but also a Christian basilica and a synagogue.

After a while I began to get temple fatigue; I thought once you've seen one mithraeum you've seen the lot (and the first mithraeum I saw was on Hadrian's Wall, in Northumberland), but I'm glad I kept going, or I'd have missed the underground mithraeum.

As you enter this mithraeum from above, at first your eyes are blinded by the sunlight outside and you can't see anything. Then as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, you see you are entering a long narrow room with benches on the sides, large enough to seat perhaps a dozen worshipers (which was about par for the course). Then your eye is grabbed by the statue at the end showing the pivotal moment in Mithraic worship: Mithras about to kill the bull, its head pulled back in one hand, the knife raised in his other. The statue is of marble, and lit by a shaft of sunlight coming in through a skylight; it glows a brilliant white, and the result is jaw-dropping, absolutely stunning. There are photos of it on my camera (and online), but none of them manages to capture the contrast in the light-levels; it must be something to do with the way the human eye works. I've seen a lot of very sumptuous places of worship in my time (of which the Tempio Maggiore was not least), but this underground mithraeum was seriously the most numiniferous place of worship I have ever encountered. (And if that's not a word, it ought to be.)

And so from mithraism back to Judaism. The synagogue in Ostia is the oldest one known in Europe. I had a look around it, then davened mincha there. As well as the main sanctuary, it featured a kitchen (where, according to the guide, they baked their "azymous bread", as if it didn't get any use the remaining three and a half hundred days of the year!) and a mikveh [ritual bath]. There were stone ledges originally above the Ark decorated with a menorah, shofar, lulav and esrog. The curious thing was that the niche where the Ark was located was not as one would expect at the front of the main sanctuary, but on the right-hand side halfway up the length of the sanctuary (if I interpret the floor plan correctly).

There were stairs going up to a no longer extant upper floor, which the guide said would be for a woman's gallery; no doubt R. Chaim Weiner would disagree about that (though I haven't (yet) raised the subject with him.

Finally, as an odd epilogue to this trip report, on the bridge over the main road one had to cross to get to Ostia, I saw an unexpected sight: a padlock attached to the wire mesh of the bridge footpath walls, with writing on it. If I'd seen this a few months earlier, I'd have been completely mystified; but as it happens I learned from englishrussia a little while ago that it's a custom in Italy (and now in Russia too) for newlyweds to write their names on a padlock and attach it to a bridge. Though, frankly, this couple could have found a nicer bridge...