Pompeii

Well, Mt. Vesuvius kept its cool for another day, and we were able to fulfill a childhood dream of Ilene's, who has had a fascination with Pompeii since she read a particular National Geographic article about it and Herculaneum over 30 years ago.

That image above is from Herculaneum which was swallowed in lava. Pompeii was smothered in ash, buried to a depth covering even the tallest temples so that no one knew it was there for 1700 years. When it was discovered, the excavation revealed spooky human-shaped casts made of ash showing how the citizens were frozen where they were caught.

Only a few are still on public display. I didn't expect the Pompeii site to still have the streets strewn ghoulishly with bodies like in that old National Geographic article, but I was surprised at how stripped and denuded it was. The houses and streets are all empty of furnishings, carts or other debris, and that frozen-in-time quality is hard to sense.

What you do see is one lane after another of intact structures, more preserved than any ancient ruins we've seen. Most remarkable is the frescoes still on the interiors of some buildings.

You have to imagine that vaulted room (a public bath house) completely filled in with ash and that piazza (the site of the Temple of Apollo, I think) covered over the height of the columns to get a sense of the eruption.

The visit is also a little bittersweet for us. We've been referring to this trip as the semester abroad we never had. In-depth trips with our favorite professors to Greece and Rome in Ilene's case and to England in my case always seemed on the horizon when we were in college but never did work out. We've always regretted missing them. We're making up for a lot of that now, but the flying visit to Pompeii without the scholarship (and having forgotten so much of our Latin in the meantime) makes us miss our youth a little more.

I Think I Can . . . Climb the Vatican

Even with a couple of rest days built in we've been wearing out our legs, not least because of getting very lost a couple times. The less said about those difficult hours the better. When we get to our destinations, though, we're seeing some amazing sights.

Most churches are open to the public from an early hour, so we used that on Friday to beat the lines for a visit to St. Peter's Basilica. The line usually snakes all the way around St. Peter's Square and doubles back on itself, but we rose early to be there at 7 a.m. before they had even turned all the lights on. Still, there was a mass going on in most of the 10 or so chapels around the perimeter. Looking for a bathroom, I stumbled into some kind of dressing room where a bunch of priests and alter boys were getting suited up. Ilene said she would be pretty jealous if I ended up meeting the pope that way.

It's a dramatic space, of course, with a lot to visit, though a lot of it is roped off for masses. Visitors are kept about 30 yards back from The Pieta.

Next we climbed to the cupola at the top of the dome, similar to the experience we had at St. Paul's in London about 13 years ago, except I'm down one ankle, one knee and one hip since then. The passageways get progressively narrow until you are squeezing between the inner and outer skins of the dome, with the stairs climbing and tilted sideways at the same time.

As I've said before, our apartment is near the Vatican, and this sequence of photos gradually zooms into our apartment from the top of the dome.

The light blue roof is the Russian Orthodox Church I mentioned. Our apartment building is the orange one immediately to the right. We're on the top full floor (not counting the one under the eaves) under the rain gutter on the side nearest the camera. If you can make out a dirty awning under the gutter, that's our veranda. The yellow two-story building at the train tracks at the bottom of the hill (nearest the foot of the blue crane) is the San Pietro Termini, which is where we usually jump on the bus into the center of the city. Where the tracks cross a viaduct over the road (Via del Gregorio VII) is the main business strip of our neighborhood where the tobacco shops, bars and fruit stands are.

Speaking of distant views of apartments, our next visit to the Vatican was on Sunday to see the man himself. Pope Francis has kept up the tradition of making a brief speech and blessing from his window at noon on Sunday. (As well as a Mass on Wednesday.) It looked to me like about a baseball stadium's worth of people were in the square -- maybe 50,000 people -- all of them absolutely silent except for a period where he gives shout outs to visiting groups and the groups cheer back. It was all in Italian, so I wasn't able to follow, but the news reports that he was commenting on the recent drowning deaths of many immigrants to Italy.

In the meantime, we went out of our way to get to the Appian Way and take a country walk, toured some catacombs, hiked all the way back into the city, visited the Baths of Caracalla, visited the Basilica of St. Mary in Trastevere (my favorite), the Basilica of St. Cecilia in Trastevera (including the Roman-era archaeological dig and decorated nun's chapel underneath and rediscovered murals in the nun's choir above), the Jewish Ghetto, the Theater of Marcellus, the Portico of Octavia . . . and we've had a few meals. Basically, I at this point, I eat anything on the menu described as de nonna. For lunch today it was pasta con ragu de nonna and torte de nonna, my new favorite desert.

And then each day we climb back up the hill from the bus stop to our apartment.