Tuesday 25 October 2011

I got up this morning and got ready to shave, only to discover that I had no hot water. Showering was not a problem because I take cool showers rather that hot showers every morning anyway.  But have you ever tried to shave in cold water? If I had been more patient I would have boiled water to shave, but instead I did the dreaded cold-water face-scrape.  When I was done I looked sort of like my rare ginormous steak from Sunday’s dinner.  Before leaving to do research I emailed my landlady to let her know that I needed hot water.

I went to a couple of museums near Termini, the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme and the Terme di Diocleziano.  Palazzo Massimo has an incredible collection, including a bunch of statuary from the reign of Augustus and his dynasty, which I surveyed for religious iconography.  This museum also houses beautiful frescoes from the villa of Augustus’ wife Livia, as well as tons of other great art. This is one of the best museums in Roma, it’s right near the main bus/train/metro station, and there’s never a line to get in.  If you’re in Roma, go!  Just a block away is another museum, the Terme di Diocleziano, partially built from the ruins of the emperor Diocletian’s immense public bathhouse. This bathhouse, or rather its huge and impressive vaulting, was a major inspiration for St. Peter’s basilica.  Now the ruins house one of the world’s greatest epigraphy collections: tens of thousands of inscriptions on stone and other media, attesting to nearly a thousand years of Roman civilization.  One of the great things about an inscription is that it is both a text and an artifact: you are looking at not just a copy, but also the original text, that the ancient Romans read.

I had lunch at Campo dei’ Fiore, one of the great public spaces in the centro storico.  Deciding on pizza, I had the traditional Roman pizza capricciosa, a very thin crust with prosciutto, artichoke hearts, olives, mushrooms, and fried egg.  Molt bene!  A very loud and fairly drunk party of Canadian tourists took up several tables nearby.  Amusingly, the over-50 folks in their party could barely walk and were constantly reprimanded by the college-age kids with them to shut up.  They didn’t know what anything on the menu was, so they asked me to translate.  I told them that I didn’t speak Canadian. Once they realized that I was kidding them, I told them that I did speak Wisconsinian, and that was close enough.  When they finished the youngsters couldn’t get a couple of their seniors to walk straight and they ended up calling a small fleet of taxis to take them away.

Returning home I found a note on my door from the water company saying that my water was going to be shut off. Luckily I had heard from my landlady by then, who said that the water issue was being fixed.  My doorbell rang (a first), and two workmen came in to fix the miniscule hot water heater.  I won’t have to butcher my face tomorrow morning!