Interesting to leave such a gap in this log. This morning I had breakfast on the terrace of this residence-hotel in Rome, with a gorgeous view of St Peter’s dome above the rooftops, and I thought about the past few weeks. This is my “free day”—we had our Naples-Pompeii outing yesterday, and a chunk of the students are off having adventures either in Naples or Florence today—and tomorrow is the final exam and farewell lunch. I had tried to go out this morning to find a New York Times to read over my breakfast, conjuring a version of normal routine from back home, but even in two orbits of increasing circumference I could not find a place open that sold the NYT. So I just ate and wrote in my journal.
As I walked I realized how much of this past month I have been trying to conserve my energy, and there was a flash of guilt about having spent so many evenings tucked in by myself, not out exploring or eating in restaurants or trying new things or working on my language skills. At the same time I had to forgive myself—or make excuses for myself—since I can’t help but recognize how over-extended I felt emotionally before the trip began, and how little in reserve I have felt I had all through the trip. This lack of extra oomph has manifested itself in multiple ways: fewer freelance expeditions, fewer blog posts, fewer letters or e-mails, fewer photos, more time tucked in to my room, etc. Yesterday on the bus ride home I remarked to Dana—as we stared through the giant bus windshield at the welcome rain pelting down on the drought-stricken Campania (Rome is contemplating water rationing starting next week)—that at times like this I just could not believe how much easier a stay-in-one-place program is compared to an always-moving one.
This is my “free day,” and yet I have 29 in-class journals to mark, a final exam to print and photocopy for tomorrow, a spreadsheet of Saturday departure-groupings to collate, a group-lunch restaurant contact to ping, and of course some laundry to do. My peculiar way of doing these courses is partly to blame, I know: those blue books are my way of making students engage in the readings every day of class, and in doing so I conduct a slow-motion dialogue with each one. The blue books also provide me with blank lined paper for the final exam, I should add, as I have almost run out of the 200-sheet block of narrow-ruled A4 that I bought in London and used for the other two essays they wrote—another oddity of mine, that I prefer to have consistent sized paper to staple together when I work my way through a stack of essays—otherwise, one gets everything from tiny 4 x 6 spiral-bound sheets to whatever backs of handouts they happen to have ready to hand, and my borderline OCD tendencies just find that abhorrent. It’s so odd to look at these things that I do from a distance, with a bemused smile; “it’s worked so far, why change it?” seems acceptable to me, as long as it is not too obnoxious. Yet at the same time I am acutely conscious that in my journaling I am perfectly willing to snipe at people who are not willing to change their behavior or patterns of reaction / response; I suppose I justify my hypocrisy by judging my own fussiness more harmless or inconsequential…
I have been more transparent about my scheduling than usual, having been burned in the past by students who felt they did not understand how the program was put together. This week in Rome for example was circumscribed in some strange ways. We arrived on Friday morning and had a walk-around, interestingly following the exact route of many Grand Tourers, into the city through the Piazza del Popolo, then up to the edge of the Pincian Gardens to get an overview of this city and establish reference points (thank you St Peters and the ever-visible Vittorio Emanuel monument!), then over to the top of the Spanish Steps and down to Spagna, where a bunch of people bailed for lunch and a hardy dozen kept on with me to the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and the Piazza Navona in the baking heat. I left them there with the orientation of the Piazza showing them how to walk due north and get to Cavour and the the differently-named continuation of their street. That evening I walked with Dana to the Aventine Hill so she knew the route too, enjoying the keyhole view of St Peters, and then having a dopey dinner on the river at a purportedly Tex Mex place, before following the river home.
Saturday was our day to visit the Forum and Ancient City—Dana and I had checked out the voucher-to-ticket sitch on our way to the Aventine the evening before—and I ended up skipping that attraction since I still had not touched the essays on Versailles that they had turned in before Les Houches, along with the journals they’d written on Shelley’s Vale of Chamouni. That day was basically just hole up in the air conditioned splendor of this place and work through the piles, trying to conjure the same doggedness I do when I have a big day of work at Inverness or Tahoe. That right there is an interesting exercise, to treat paper-marking as a professional skill akin to joist-setting or drywall-mudding or redwood-milling or shingling or tree-felling, the same sort of “make little ones out of big ones” attitude or excitement or feeling of anticipation, instead of getting intimidated by the size of the to-do pile. I had the temptation of watching the Tour de France individual time trial, as well as some women's euro cup soccert, but I rationed myself, and finished the last blue books around midnight.
Sunday was a class day—had to be—and in the evening we took a big gaggle to the Aventine. But immediately after class—where I turned back their Versailles essays, some with pleasantly surprising marks, others distressing—I offered some more office hours, and ended up with about 5 or 6 people in a sort of tutorial situation just working through some of the basic grammar and terminology and thesis-development stuff that I do in every writing class but which I was gun-shy to do this year because of the experiences in Paris last summer. Totally different vibe this time—“I feel like a learned more in this past two hours than I have since high school”—which was pretty cool. I confess I did not mark many blue-books that evening, and Monday was a short class because we had the Vatican tour at 11:30. In amongst all this I had to field some challenges like the weird smarmy space cadet whose handwriting is terrible AND whose writing itself is so incoherent that I firmly believe he was either drunk when he wrote it, or so sleep deprived that it was impossible to follow. I didn’t put a grade on it, and told him he had to read it out loud to me. If my horses run according to form, he won’t. He’ll find some cockamamie excuse. This is the kid who texted Dana that “he was running a little late” to Versailles at the time we were supposed to be meeting there, and probably spent a total of a half an hour racing through the palace. Ironically enough he is slightly older (26?) and has a lamentably exaggerated vision of his own charm and intelligence… Yet in his bulletproof cluelessness he evaluated his “citizenship” grade (a mixture of punctuality, alertness, attitude, cooperativeness etc) as an A, despite having blown off multiple class events in London and Paris; the one thing you can count on with him is that when you are in ahurry to do something else, he will buttonhole you with some bizarre question or a breathtakingly obvious comment.
After just an hour of class we had Monday’s Vatican tour—arranged almost exactly 60 days before the date, to follow the arcane Vatican Museum website stipulations; I say “almost exactly” because they don’t update the website automatically, and you have this weird three or four days of every-four-hours checking the site to see whether the availability for your day is suddenly posted. This year it took three days from the start of the official 60, and you get the official voucher to print out, and you have to have a special letterhead / sealed letter of authenticity about your status as a University group, and you have to include a roster of each student and his or her university affiliation to present at the group ticket counter after you bypass the literally blocks-long line snaking along the blistering street. The tour itself was an adventure as usual, with the Costco style of floor-to-ceiling treasures and IKEA-style salmon-flow. Our guide, Maria-Theresa, was cut from the same cloth as our wonderful Rosalba in 2015 (in fact they trained together) and mercifully applied just the right blend of erudition and humor to her task. Of course, after the Sistine Chapel we lost track of many of the group as they went for food instead of continuing to the Basilica the easy way, and for me the absurdity of the whole enterprise brings out the Mark Twain sarcasm about the inconsistencies of Catholicism: these same a-holes enforcing a cover-your-shoulders-this-is-a-holy-place dress code are probably groping or wolf-whistling my students on the Metro after work. God doesn’t want you to take pictures in the Chapel, although God doesn’t mind selling you photo-postcards in the gift shop just outside. God really doesn’t want you talking in the chapel, but God doesn’t mind “NO TALKING NO TALKING” at ear-splittingly amplfied volumes booming through the hallowed hall every two minutes.
After walking with one of the students back to St John’s to pick up my backpack, I headed home again to mark journals. Late in the evening—I took a nap that turned longer than I’d have liked—I attempted to scope out the best route to the Borghese museum which we would visit from 3-5 the next day. Again this is one of those weird constraints that I shared with students: I want to do the B after the Vatican; the B is closed on Mondays; you can’t do Pompeii-Naples on Tuesday because the museum is closed on Tuesdays; you want to have a free day after Naples-Pompeii to facilitate trips; etc. So the week falls the way it falls, dictated back in October but with some of the details not really set-able until much later in the organizational cycle. That late-evening trip turned into an adventure: I had seen a possible bus solution to the Borghese, number 490, but it turns out there are 490s and there are 490s that are expresses. And even though they go by Lepanto (the stop closest to St Johns) they don’t actually stop at any of the recognizable stops there (I checked). Now, the buses are the sort of Varsity Team of public transit anywhere, but more so in Rome. I am stoked to say that I have been much more willing to try them this visit than in past years, but this time I walked to Flaminio and then saw a 490 and hopped it—but it blasted through the night alarmingly non-stop, not announcing “Prossima Fermatas” at all. As we entered a tunnel I hit the stop button hoping to avoid being taken all the way to the terminus at Tiburtina train station, but unfortunately found myself dumped in the frickin tunnel with everyone looking at me. Chagrined, I got off and walked my way back up an increasingly narrow sidewalk and over to the park. Walking home at 11 I realized I had taken a wrong turn in the overcast-dark park and was semi lost. Fun. But I survived.
Tuesday’s class I ended up doing quite a lot on Mark Twain’s riff about Italy as reflected in an Italian’s visit to America ("When I was there I was amazed to find that farmers tilled their own land, not some lord's, and they could worship whatever way they wanted, or not at all...), but I also had them do their self-evaluations where they write candidly about their own citizenship grade and also write about the contributions of at least three of their classmates—positive, not snarky. This is something I’ve done every year since my second SA experience, and it is often incredibly revealing (besides providing me with a peer perspective that I use when a student asks me for a letter of recommendation down the line). As with all “last things” I feel slightly emotional, even though I did not have them read Johnson’s Idler 103 this year. During class Dana had scoped what turned out to be an awesomely efficient route to the Borghese using Metro assist to Spagna and then an improbable sequence of escalators and moving-sidewalks that would spit you out in a dusty corner of the park with just one awkward street-crossing before the park-avenue allee to the museum itself. But before that departure (at 2 PM to ensure that I would be able to negotiate the voucher-to-ticket exchange and arrange for audioguides), I knew that we needed to nail down the arrangements for our Friday farewell lunch, which I hoped to do at the same little osteria on the Via Crescenzia that I had tumbled on in 2015.
As luck would have it, I didn’t really need my little paragraph of Google-Translate-assisted explanation. She and I walked into the place and before I was two sentences into my spiel the guy Luca came over and recognized me with a huge smile—he was cooking now, not waiting tables, and he immediately agreed to the plan for a nice family style lunch at 13:30 on venerdi for 31 with no alcohol and some vegetarian stuff and so on. Before all of that, would Dana and I like to eat-a, outside or in, what would we like, we asked him for a recommendation and he said the day's special was a pasta with tuna and olives and we said yes. It could not have gone better. We had a beer and this excellent pasta, he came out and we nailed down some details (“For the vegetarian, I can does a veggie burger, with-a potato and-a zucchini, no mit”) and when we asked for our lunch bill he refused “”No you are-a my friend! I see you Friday! You text me when you are coming-a.” Unbelievable. So yeah, they will get a nice payday on an otherwise slow afternoon, the students get a big nice meal of food they might never otherwise eat, and they have the evening free before they leave the next day. I was soooo moved by this experience—the guy is such a sweetie and my cares sort of melted away. That’s the last hurdle I know, and I won’t relax until they’re all flown Saturday at 10, but that was a load off of my mind.
The Borghese visit was great as always, even with some chaos around getting 30 audioguides (“Why don’t you do a tour, it’s chipper.” “Because tours in museums usually aren’t a great thing for students,” I said to myself). For me the Borghese is the world’s richest trove of high-quality art in a spectacular yet manageable setting. I had tried not to over-sell it to my students, but I was gratified to see their jaws drop at the Bernini sculptures or the Caravaggios and Titians. We also enjoyed a slight cooling trend in the weather, which meant the walk home after our two-hour time slot was even more pleasant. About the only discordant note in the day was this weird modern “installation” that begins about an hour into the visit: some guy won a competition to place this, and recorded his increasingly loud and excited breathing for three minutes, culminating in a weird sort of scream. Oh right, this is “transgressive art,” I forgot. I remarked to a couple of appropriately receptive students that this seemed to be a “Borgheseasm,” which actually I guess it was. Definitely not my cuppa tea.
That catches me up to yesterday’s Naples-Pompeii expedition. I had gotten the guide recommendation from Jay and Victor for my trip in 2015, and the bus was arranged by the STA folks in London. It’s a schlep from Rome, almost a 3 hour ride depending on traffic and whether we stopped for a pee break (we did, since as usual the bus WC was non-functional), and there was some conflict toward the end as the driver was reaching the end of his allotted time. I hope he was mollified by a nice tip. But we got to Pompeii and found the ever-cheerful Carmine by the entrance, and then after at least a 15 minute wait for more peeing, we did our highlight-tour. The guy is just plain skilled: easygoing but efficient, funny without being stupid, well-informed without ever being pedantic. About 2/3 of the way through I made an executive decision to skip the long wait (in the sun) for the House of Pleasure, having been promised that we would see the illustrations in the Secret Cabinet in the course of our afternoon visit in Naples. We saw stuff that I remembered, and stuff that I hadn’t seen before (some under restoration two years ago, I learned), and my group asked good questions and paid attention (not always a given). With clouds looming to the southeast and some cool breeze, this was a much less furnace-like experience than my previous one, and we finished around 1:30.
Then it was back on the bus and into the cauldron of Naples downtown, which Ulisse our driver negotiated in pretty good form (he said he hadn’t received the full itinerary with the Naples leg, but indeed I texted the lady in London from the bus and she called the company to confirm). This traffic is truly the bridge to third-world chaos. As Carmine said, “In Naples there are one million people, two million cars, and three million scooters. Lanes are only suggestions, and the most important item for the driver is the horn.” Miraculously we found a legal spot to be dropped outside the pizzeria Carmine knows, where all but the lactose-intolerant enjoyed their enormous pizza margherita delivered four at a time from the oven out front. It was nice to sit with Carmine, who just turned 50 but also just became a dad (watching his face light up as he talked about 7-month-old Luigi was a highlight of the trip for me).
Then it was up to the Museum, walking through the improbably narrow streets of the old city, negotiating the ticket office easily, and enjoying this tour of the artifacts of ancient cities looted by the old King of Naples and others. I loved the way Carmine hooked the students by talking about mosaics and level-of-detail / expense in terms of pixels and resolution! I saw that he started with monochrome simple ones and blew their minds with the incredibly detailed almost-three-dimensional multi-colored ones later on. As promised, he also showed us the Secret Cabinet, with a somewhat abashed smile (“If you were illiterate, or did not speak the local dialect, you could still order what you wanted by pointing to the picture of it, just like McDonalds”), but the students took it in stride, with one of them remarking as she exited past the Priapus statue, “Consult a doctor if you experience erections lasting more than 2000 years,” which I thought was pretty funny at the time. Maybe we are all getting punchy.
By the time we finished up (and unfortunately the top gallery with the plaster casts and some other stuff I wanted to see was closed in the afternoon—Carmine shrugged and said, “they never actually tell you”), the bus driver was having a slight conniption, but we got the Naples-stayers’ gear off the bus and the other students on the bus in record time, and commenced our drive back to Rome through the intermittent rain, after a heartfelt round of applause for Carmine. As usual, most of the students zonked out instead of watching the changing countryside, but I confess to dozing off for a 20 myself so I can’t complain too much.
That brings me basically up to date. As I did last year, I find myself simultaneously wishing I could spend more time in Rome, and being very ready to get back home. I have blue books to mark, a restaurant to ping, and some airport-shuttle groupings to communicate, but as I walked around this morning I couldn’t help feeling the incredible energy of this city and its people. I don’t know what it is. I can juuust feel the radio signal of Italian comprehension starting to tune in, with phrases (sometimes nonsense ones that just capture the rhythm) popping through my consciousness as I think about putting my foot tentatively into the rushing stream of syllables flowing by. As in other aspects of this trip, I hold back a little, knowing I need to conserve my energy, but I am also conscious that I am on the edge of something powerful.
What is it? I don’t know. I have no idea whether this is truly my last round-up, Summer-Abroad-wise. As I did when I talked Legal Writing with a small group of students at dinner in Les Houches, or talked grammar / terminology with a different group of students here last week, there’s a part of me that is reluctant to admit that I am completely hanging up my uniform for good. I can see why aging athletes don’t know when to quit. There’s no one really kicking me out the door, and yet, I know I cannot face the prospect of more day-in day-out drudgery of paper marking and ego-massaging and duckling-wrangling. And when I contemplate another round of bureaucratic hassles and Summer Abroad hoop-jumping, part of me just says the hell with it, it’s not worth it. And yet. Maybe there is a combination of language course and cooking course I could get into. Am I, like Jhumpa Lahiri, mesmerized enough with Italian to make the commitment to learn it? I have no idea. Most obviously, can I go through another period of uncertainty on the family front while still trying to do this? I doubt it.
OK, time to get back to the ostensible reason for my being here…
