Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The Memories Linger On!

Diario di Roma Dué (Rome Diary 2)
Tuesday October 27, 2015
Partly Sunny 70°F/21°C in Roma
Partly Sunny 82°F/ 28°C in Rancho Santa Margarita
Buongiorno,
  To borrow a Mark Twain quote from the home page of my website www.mikebotula.com... “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” 
   I heartily second that motion, Sam! Travel has definitely changed for the better my personal

Bridge of Sighs Venezia

outlook on the world. I’ve also watched changes in the outlooks of my fellow landsmen after they’ve been on the road to destinations far away. Travel has certainly broadened my son’s outlook. Michael went to London in his twenties, met a pretty girl from Rome, and not only is still there, but applying for citizenship. Laura and her family made him feel welcome, taught him Italian, and a few days ago he called me and asked “dear old dad” to FedEx him his birth certificate to complete his Italian citizenship application. (I kind of figured this might happen when he came home from his “holiday” showed his mom and I a picture of Laura, packed the rest of his clothes and went right back to Rome). Now I see more of him when I travel to Rome myself.
Michael, Laura, MikeBo in Selci
   The first time I landed at Fiumicino International, a whole new world was waiting for me. Now, on each succeeding touchdown I feel more like I’m coming home again. The city has really grown on me, especially after my last visit, when I moved into my own little studio apartment and became part of a new neighborhood. In August when Michael and I drove past my old apartment building in Mostacciano, I asked him to check with my former landlord on any vacancies when I come back the next time. With each visit, Michael and Laura introduce me to new places and new people all over Italy. On the last trip, in 2013, we went to Pompeii, Napoli and Firenze (Florence). The trip to Florence introduced me to the wonderful world of high speed train service. Roma to Firenze in an hour-and-a half, then to walk the streets where the Medici’s presided at the dawn of the Renaissance. We toured the Uffizzi, the stupendous art gallery that was once the corporate world headquarters of La Famiglia de Medici  and walked across il Ponte Vecchio, a 14th century Florentine slaughterhouse that is now one of Europe’s most famous
Ponte Vecchio Firenze
market places for gold and silver artifacts and jewelry. We toured il Duomo, the famous cathedral, where I bought several watercolors to adorn the walls of my home back in California.
  I learned to get around town on Rome’s modern Metro, and unscrambled the mysteries of the Atac transit system’s network of bus lines. I went to the market on my own, weighed and tagged my produce for the checker, and bagged my own groceries while transacting all of my business in Euros. ATM’s in Rome work just like the ones in San Francisco, and so do our credit cards. Travelers checks are almost a mere curiosity these days. And spending Euros has long ended the madness of changing your money into a different currency each time you cross a national boundary. Among my souvenirs is a collection of Deutschemarks, Francs, Austrian Schillings, Guilders and Lira, a reminder of post war European travels.
   My first overseas adventure was in 1975 when my wife and I went to Germany for a month. We stayed with my Air Force pilot kid brother Packy and his then-fiancé Sue. It was the first overseas journey for both Donna and I – LAX to Frankfurt in a Lufthansa Boeing 707 with an hour stopover in Amsterdam. It was in Germany that I learned my first lesson in overseas travel – wherever you go on your first trip, if at all possible, make sure you have a good friend who lives there to be  your guide.   Packy and Sue were terrific hosts and tour guides. We started in Frankfurt and spent ten days on the road all through Austria and Bavaria, including a weekend in Mϋnchen for Oktoberfest,  and
Kehlstein Haus in the Day!
Berchtesgaden
where we hiked and visited Hitler’s retreat and the teahouse he built for his first lady, Eva Braun. (Everytime I see shots of Der Fϋhrer strutting along at his mountaintop lair on The History Channel, I tell everyone within earshot that Hey!  I had a couple of beers right where Hitler’s walking!) By the end of our second week, I was ready to move there. As we traveled with Packy and Sue, we found our hotels at random. Around 3 in the afternoon we’d start looking at the front windows of the gӓsthausen or pensionen along the highway. If we saw a sign that read zimmer frei, and it looked OK to us, we’d pull in and check it out. The rooms were always clean and cozy and frϋstϋck was always served first thing in der stϋbe.
  The following year, I was sent on assignment to Guatemala…just a few weeks after the catastrophic 1976 earthquake, that dwarfed LA’s Big One, the 1971 Sylmar quake. That’s where I learned to pay attention to the local advice for staying healthy in a strange land, and became famous on our return flight for being the only journalist on the press plane not to become a victim
Guatemala 1976
of the traveler’s Green Apple Quickstep. (Jimmy Carter called it Montezuma’s Revenge). A few years after that, I went back to Germany as a guest of the U.S. Air Force to cover Reforger, one of the annual Fall NATO war games. That trip gave me the opportunity to visit East Berlin while it was still firmly behind the Iron Curtain, and, I got to go because I was the only person in the newsroom with a passport. That is my second bit of travel advice. You gotta have a passport. If all goes well my son will have two, US and Italian.
  In between my last trip to Germany and my first trip to Rome, all of my adventures were domestic. That is if you call traveling all over California and the rest of the United States on assignments, business trips and vacations with side trips to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. In all, I have made four trips to Rome, staying longer each time. My love affair with the Eternal City got its start way back in high school in Morris Diamond’s Latin class. We spent the first year translating Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico, his account of his campaigns in Gaul from Latin into English.  It was Mr. Diamond who inadvertently taught me my own first rule of foreign travel – learn to understand at least a little of the language in the country you are traveling to. The second rule is at least teach yourself to count in the language of the country you are going to. Since my third  rule, and  my son the tour guide’s first bit of advice to his tour customers is if your waiter gives you a menu that is translated into four languages beside English, get up and run for the exit. It’s a tourist trap!
 
Inside the Coliseum
Its hard to believe that I made my first trip to Rome in 2005. Looking back now we worked hard to get ready for the trip.  I checked my passport to make sure it was current, and Monica applied for hers in plenty of time before liftoff. I signed up for an Italian language class through the Italian Cultural Center in Sacramento. Our teacher, Patrizia Cinquini Cerruti, is a native Italian who operates a successful travel service specializing in tours to Italy. Her textbook Buon Viaggio, A Travelers Guide to Italian Language and Culture is a great primer for travelers. If you live in the Sacramento area, I heartily recommend it. One huge difference in the travel landscape between my first trip to Europe and my first trip to Italy is the currency. Italy is now one of 28 members of the European Union. No more fumbling with deutschemarks, Austrian schillings, lira, guilders or francs. No sir! Sole currency for just about every nation in Europe is the Euro! Britain and the Pound Sterling being the sole holdout!
   On the trip I just came back from, Michael and Laura once again took me on new adventures, one of which was another high speed train trip on Italo to Venezia, fabled Venice, the longest surviving
Morning Traffic in Venezia
republic in history – over a thousand years. We spent two long holiday weeks at Laura’s family’s mountain retreat in Selci in Sabina… and explored a number of Medieval fortress villages nearby: Tolfa, Bagnoregio, Rochettine and a host of others. We returned to one of my particular favorites, the 12th century Benedictine abbey at Farfa, also in Sabina. I went to work with my tour guide son and revisited Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius, joined a group going through the catacombs and toured the crypts of the Dominican Church in Rome where the monks of old decorated several of the crypts with the bones of other monks who had predeceased the artists. That’s where I was welcomed back to Roma by the lovely Alba, the manager of the museum gift shop. We also took a short Metro trip to Ostia Antica, Imperial Rome’s ancient seaport. And, when we  returned to Galleria Borghese, Michael was leading our tour. He amazed me yet again with his knowledge of art and his grasp of Italian history. He’s on a first name basis with just about all of the ancient Roman emperors. Then, just before I left Rome to come back to the states, I flew to Amsterdam on a very sentimental journey.
   Joan and I had been steadies right after we both graduated from high school. I was from Riverhead. She was from Westhampton. Our romance lasted until she trundled off to New York
2 BR w/canal view Amsterdam
University on a full scholarship and it wasn’t too long after that, we went our separate ways. But we managed to stay in touch over the years, and now, in both our Golden Years, she was living in Amsterdam and I had moved from New York ultimately settling in California. So, as I made plans for my latest Rome trip, I called Joan and made a date to fly up to Amsterdam and take her to dinner for old time’s sakes. An Easy Jet non-stop put me practically on her doorstep. At her suggestion, I booked into the Wilhelmina and was given the keys to a fourth floor room, which I found at the top of an excruciatingly long, winding stairwell.
  After a short walk to Joan’s apartment, and a reunion chat over coffee, we decided that since neither one of us could walk around like we used to, she called a cab and we headed off for a boat tour of the canals of Amsterdam. It was a preview for me of our upcoming trip to Venice.
  Amsterdam, especially the older sections on the canals is quite charming, and there is a lot of history there. After all, my birthplace, New York was once Nieu Amsterdam almost 400 years ago. And I could just visualize the early Dutch governer of Nieu Amsterdam, Pieter Stuyvesant clomping around Manhattan on his wooden leg growling out his distress that the British had just told him he was being evicted. But, the canal boat ride gave Joan and I the perfect opportunity to catch up on old times. At one point, we reminisced about the different directions our lives had taken us and we realized that we had six marriages between us. (At the end of seven innings, the score is 4 to 2 with Joan leading Mike by two!) We had already passed the Van Gogh Museum and the national treasure, The Rijksmuseum.
Joan and Mike Again!
But Amsterdam also has a lot of other museums which might interest you: Museum of Bags and Purses, popularly referred to as the Coach Museum; Foam Photography Museum; Diamond Museum; Bijbels Museum which boasts the oldest Bible printed in the Netherlands-the 1477 Delftse Bijbel; The KattenKabinet, an art museum devoted to works depicting cats; Verzetsmuseum, the Dutch Resistance Museum, tells the story of the Dutch people between 1940 and 1945 in World War II. The city also boasts the Cheese Museum and the everpopular Marijuana Museum. There is also the Anne Frank Museum which radiates a certain solemnity which could be felt even at a distance as our tour boat passed by. As our boat pulled back into its pier we agreed that a boat tour was a great way to spend a first-date-in-over-a-half-century kind of afternoon. And, it reminded us of another boat ride we took long ago as we explored New York City together – our 25 cent ride on the Staten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and back to Battery Park.
  After another day of catching up, Joan called a cab for me and I headed back to Schipol to catch my Easy Jet return flight to Rome and our next adventure – our Italo high speed train ride to Venezia. But that is a tale to be told another time. Halloween is right around the corner and I have a story of my own to tell about that before we travel to Venice.
Ciao,
MikeBo
© By Mike Botula 2015 

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