Rome in a Day

Once I spent a rainy day in Rome, and I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking about that memory a lot today, so I thought I'd share it with you.

I was flying home for Christmas from Malta, where I had been living and working at the time, and I had a stopover in Rome. As sometimes happens, I was required to check my luggage out and run across the length of the entire airport dragging it behind me to check it back in.

By the time I got to checkin, huffing and puffing, the lady behind the counter told me that I was too late and I had missed my flight. She must have had to relay that bad news often, because she brusquely informed me I would be on the same flight tomorrow and then she turned and disappeared into a doorway before I could say or do anything.

I sat down on my suitcase to get my bearings. Why did this kind of stuff always happen to me? What was I supposed to do now? And then it hit me:

I was in Rome--Rome!--for 24 hours! If you've got to be stuck somewhere for 24 hours, it might as well be one of the greatest cities in the world!

I put my suitcase into storage for the night and took a shuttle into the city. I bought a map at a newspaper stand and then got some surprisingly bad pizza at a little restaurant--probably bad because it was close to the station and only meant for gullible tourists like me.

Fortified with food, I set off in the direction of the Colosseum, because of course you've got to see that if you're in Rome. It was interesting, but I walked around the whole thing and there didn't seem to be a way to go inside--I think it must have been closed for repairs.

So then I headed in the direction of this thing, because it looked promising:

Pretty soon I came to the remains of the Roman Forum, and walked along the edge until... it began to rain.

and rain, and pour, and storm.

I looked up to my left and saw a building with horses and angels on top

and I ended up huddling under one of the pillars in front of it as the rain grew stronger.

An endless stream of "umbrelly" men kept coming up to me and asking, "Umbrelly?" I knew from talking to another traveler not to buy umbrellas on the street, because they are very bad quality and can't hold off rain. So I kept shaking my head and getting (probably much more) annoyed (than I should have) that they were trying to take advantage of the situation to sell me a useless product.

Eventually one of the guards of the big ostentatious angel-chariot building--which I only just now looked up and is called Altare della Patria--invited me to go inside out of the rain. I thanked him and went it. This is what it looks like inside:

and this is the view from the roof:

I wandered around the whole building, but it was still raining. The friendly guard told me I should take a look at the museum downstairs. So I did. It was a museum about Italian migration.

And then I saw... HER.

and I knew it was her when I saw it! I knew that ship! It was the Doulos, a ship I had spent 3 weeks on a few years earlier! Sure enough, I checked the name, and it read Roma, one of the four names she had had during her nearly hundred-year run at sea!

And I stood there and thought about how random it was that I was standing there, looking at this model of "my" ship, in a basement museum of a building I was only in because of the rain, in Rome, where I only was because I had missed my flight.

This video was made by my friend Jack during the time I was on the Doulos. It was really awesome to sail across the wildest sea in the world (the Tasman Sea) in the oldest sea-going vessel in the world!

When the rain finally stopped, it was getting dark, so I headed in the general direction of the station, but I wanted to see one more thing before I left: the Trevi Fountain, because they say if you drink from that fountain, you will one day come back to Rome.

Following my map and dragging my little carry-on suitcase over the cobble stones in the gathering dusk, the streets became narrower and narrower. This can't be right, I thought. The fountain is a major tourist attraction. I poked my head into a little shop and asked lamely, "Dove è la fontana?" Where is the fountain? The shopkeepers smiled at my childish Italian and pointed down the street.

So I kept going. And the street opened up and there was the fountain. Behind a mass of fencing and construction.

I got as close as I could and pressed my face up to a crack in the wooden fence to see it in the dark. But I couldn't reach it. And I couldn't drink from it. So now I have no guarantee I will ever go back to Rome.

But at least I got to see my ship. <3

If you want to read more about the remarkable Doulos (a.k.a. Medina, Roma, and Franca C), this is an excellent resource: http://www.ssmaritime.net/Doulos-Index.htm