Rome is too much to capture in a simple blog. That would be a full-time job. Or maybe I was just moving too fast and seeing too much. My last post was a month ago, and friends are beginning to text and write to me to see if I’m still alive. Well, I am, back in Atlanta and trying to do a wrap on a wonderful two months in Rome.
You can’t be in this city during Easter, or just about any time, without feeling the presence of Catholicism. There’s St. Peter’s sitting across the river with the Pope who appears periodically to bless throngs and run around the piazza in his convertible. Nuns and priests are everywhere, and there is a grand church on just about every corner full of statues and painting of saints and often parts of their bodies ensconced in reliquaries. Clutches of young seminarians stroll up and down Via Giulia and a group of them gathers i for lunch every day at the little cantina next door. Their chatter is just like that of any other group of youngsters starting out on their lives, but instead of chattering about what the market’s doing or who bought what kind of car, the conversations are about where they hope to make their parish. Today it was a competition between villages in Slovenia and towns in Spain with a break for saying grace over the same spaghetti carbonara that I was enjoying, gracelessly, at the next table .
What this amounts to is that it’s hard to be a heathen in Rome. Too much evidence surrounds to contradict. The week leading up to Easter was rainy and cold, and this is what St. Peter’s looked like on Saturday as the city awaited the Resurrection.
The weather forecast was gloomy, for chilly temperatures and rain for Easter Sunday. But here’s what Easter Sunday looked like.
This pope is a real charmer, riding around the piazza and up and down the street to wave to the crowds, but check out the guy in the beret in the foreground. No one does uniforms like the Italians, but that’s another story that would take pages. Apologies for the photo quality. I copied this from Don’s files. He’s taller and got a better shot.
I can’t begin to fill in the blanks for the past month, so I’m inserting photos from the 1,852 that I took of stuff that especially caught my eye .
Who knew it was possible to achieve such detail with mosaics.
Here are some of the astounding things medieval and baroque architects did with marble:
These floors were made around the same time as the mosaics, 12th century.
My friend Don came for a visit. After we were Pope-blessed, we did most of the usual tourist stuff, which mostly involves eating.
We checked out the action in Trastevere. The fountain in the piazza has been in its current spot in one form or another since the 4th century. It was remodeled in the 12the century, and then Bernini made some refinements in the 16th. Someone came along in the 17th and turned the seashells around to face inward. Somewhere along that long line, wide steps were added for seating.
There is always music going on in the piazza. Usually it’s an Argentine group playing tangoes, but that day it was rock and roll.
The following Wednesday we headed to Greece to visit my family and to celebrate Greek Easter. I’ve never in my life been in the middle of so much religion. My cousin Sofia is a retired math teacher and school principal who has taken up herbalism. She makes lotions and creams and oils using local herbs and flowers and knows all about the medicinal properties of the plants in the nearby mountains. She was our guide for a Holy Thursday tour of mountains and monasteries.
Sofia was the first family member I met back in 1992 when I reunited my New Orleans family with my grandfather’s Greek family after a lapse in communication of nearly 80 years . She was my interpreter for our first evening together, which was cut short by an earthquake (the old gods rolled over in their sleep). My Uncle George, whom I met the next day, pronounced me the Christopher Columbus of the Magafas family.
The weather was overcast and windy, and spring had come to the mountains. The variety of tiny wildflowers was immense, and Sofia seemed to know what every plant was good for.
Sofia said that red poppies are good for tea and salves but were not narcotic. However, my cousin Dimitrius, who is a master farmer, said their tea makes a nice sedative.
The mountains of the Peloponnese are breathtaking, beautiful, huge.
Sofia said she’d like to show us a beautiful nunnery, but she said the drive up was too precipitous. That was all Don needed to hear, so of course we headed up to the top. Sofia closed her eyes for most of the way. It did turn out to be one of the worst roads I’d traveled, but the drive was worth it.
Here are some frescoes of hero saints from inside the church, very different from the passive way Roman saints are depicted. They’re depicted looking out at you instead of heavenward. Interesting.
The views from the top of the mountain were breathtaking. We could see the Gulf of Corinth, and those are the mountains of ancient Delphi barely visible in the mist on the far side of the Gulf.
Sofia explained that lilacs are called Easter flowers (I won’t attempt to type the Greek name). Lilacs bloom at Easter in Greece regardless of when Easter falls. I have a great video of her explaining the legend, but I can’t figure how to post it (too large a file).
In the Greek church, as I understand it, Christ dies on Holy Thursday, and is buried on Good Friday. Each church has a symbolic bier that the faithful visit, and church bells toll all day. Then at night, everyone in town gathers for a candlelight procession in which the bier is carried through the streets. I have a video of the procession that is too long to post, and I have no idea how to edit a video. Thus, this blurry, accidental snapshot will have to do. Just imagine everyone in town following a procession carrying candles led by a band playing doleful music while the church bell tolls and the priest chants.
On Saturday I helped (or hindered) the cooks while cousin Vivi chopped liver for the traditional Easter dish, Magiritsa, and cousin Tasia made a sort of Greek lamb paté. I don’t know how to spell it, but it sounds like cocoretsis. Vivi is famous for being able to chop everything in finer pieces than anyone else in the family.
This is what it all looked like when she was done. (I chopped those green onions in the green bowl, I did.)
I won’t say what goes into this dish (you don’t want to know). It’s a sort of lamb paté that is absolutely delicious.
All this translated into an Easter Sunday feast that involved a whole lamb roasted in a sealed brick oven and expertly handled by Vivi and Dimitrius, the master cook.
I was going to post a photo of the dinner table, but although I took about 15 shots, each showed lovely people with faces contorted with chewing so that they would have killed me if I’d posted one. This is what the fabulous dinner looked like.
I have another two weeks to catch up on, but I’m going to close this post for now lest I never finish it. Apologies for typos. More to come (of both).