Mary Mary

The Virgin Mary is a very important figure in Italy, in both a religious and practical way. While the Catholicism of Rome is a variable thing (some are martyrs, some are Borgia popes, and most people oscillate between those extremes), Mary is constant. She is there when they baptize the Roman babies (and the Sicilian, and the Florentine, and all the Italian babies, for that matter) in an elaborate ceremony that revolves around a pampered infant in a frilly dress, who probably won't remember any of it, and she is there when those infants grow up and get married (another elaborate ceremony involving a frilly dress; the Italians seem to really love them). When people are trying to have children, they go write notes to the Virgin and leave them at the feet of her

statues. When those children, a few years later, fall off a playground, their mothers call on Mary again for help. She is not just for children and mothers, however; grown men invoke her name when they see a beautiful woman walking down the street (their eyes bug out and they yell 'maDONNA', with a great flourish and serious emphasis on the 'donna' part.)

In return for this constant work, however, Mary gets a few perks, and one of them, currently in process here in my lovely Trastevere, is a huge festival devoted to her. There are many Marys in Rome, but this festival is the Celebrazioni per la Festa della Madonna del Carmine, better

known in English as Our Lady of Mount Carmel, friend to the Carmelites. Technically, her feast

day is the 16th of July, but since 1996 (and I know this because there is a plaque put up by John Paul II on the church) there has been a big festival in this area that lasts for 10 days, the last of which was yesterday.

On the first day of her festival, they dress the large (almost life sized) statue of the Virgin in a beautiful dress (she gets a new one every year, though they always look the same) and a m

assive crown, and they put in her hands something called 'scapulars'. (A side story: it took me ages to figure out what these were called, because all the people I asked were too busy yelling to enunciate properly...) Having looked it up later, I found that while a scapular refers to the monk's cloak, which goes over the shoulders and covers the front and the back, what our Mary was holding is a devotional scapular, which in her case is a small rectangle of wood with a beautiful

silver overlay. She holds four of them, two in each hand, with her initials and a portrait of her with the baby Jesus on them.

Having dressed her up for the occasion, the population of Trastevere all crams into San Crisogono for mass, and then the statue is lifted up on a platform and processed around the neighborhood. For the occasion, some streets are decorated with Christmas lights. And there were masses of people waiting for the Virgin to appear. When she did, she was announced by a man on a loudspeaker, who sang (quite well, actually) Schubert's Ave Maria. When he was done, her procession moved up the street, and people were yelling her name and applauding. This is a picture of her being carried by the Carmelite monks, but that man's head got in the way of my camera flash:

Here you can see her processing up the street with all the Christmas lights:

She ends up in another church, Sant' Agata, where she stayed until this morning. At that point, as far as I can tell, she is sprited off to someplace upriver, and there she waits, until the evening. This evening, Dara and I were wandering around Trastevere, unaware of the impending arrival of Mary (unaware, in fact, that she had left Sant' Agata), but when we got to Ponte Garibaldi, we saw not only that bridge lined with people holding candles, but the bridges as far down as Tiber Island, and the top of the Tiber embankments on both sides of the river as well. Not wanting to miss out, we collected some candles and elbowed our way to the front of the crowd, and waited. The sun started to go down, which makes a beautiful light at that exact point in Rome (more on this in another post), and people started to light their candles. Eventually, Mary appeared, still decked out in all her finery, on a boat, majestically moving down the river. When the boat reached Ponte Garibaldi, Mary, after disembarking, was once more carried on her platform and processed towards Santa Maria in Trastevere, possibly one of the top 5 most beautiful churches in Rome.

More yelling and cheering accompanied her, as did throngs of people holding lit candles, which was a bit of an adventure. When the statue and her followers reached Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, the bells of the church started to ring, and the statue was moved inside the church. At that point, there was a rush for tables at local restaraunts, and I could hear people thanking the Virgin when they managed to grab one of the prime, outdoor tables. The next day, in a much quieter and more solemn procession, Mary was returned to Sant' Agata and her festival garb removed, to face another year of being the go-to girl of Romans and Italians everywhere.

Tram Magic

One of the beauties of not driving in Rome is the public transportation system. While that might sound incredibly facetious, I am in fact a big fan of this system. Mostly because it is almost entirely free to use (to the intrepid and attentive, if morally ambiguous passenger), but also because it is diverse and generally air conditioned.

This is not to say there are not flaws in the system. I imagine that the Roman Transportation Authority (ATAC, ironically) feels that all the free rides are a flaw, but for the normal traveller, these flaws are things like overcrowding, noise, and the fact that none of the buses seem to have any sort of suspension (and Rome is a city of cobbled streets). I can't say anything bad about the scheduling, because buses, trains, and trams tend to be pretty regular.

I happen to live near one of the tram lines, which I love, because it is usually faster and cooler than the bus, and because it is the fastest way to get to the center of town. It is also quiet, and free from the plague of cobblestones. Still, the tram has its own problems, which would never happen on a bus, such as too many trams at the capolinea, the turnaround point, or abrupt stops due to electrical short circuits.

Today, however, one of the doors on the tram would not close. No matter how many times the driver pressed the button, the doors stayed resolutely open, even after everyone on board had moved far away from them. The button pressing and anxious glares went on for about 3 minutes before someone decided to take matters into his own hands. A little old Italian man got up out of his seat with a great air of command and wisdom, and approached the misbehaving doorswith both hands in the air. The driver pressed the useless 'close' button once more, before geturing to the old man to go on with whatever he was doing. The man eyed the doors speculatively, looked them up and down, and with a great movement of his head, sneezed on them.

They closed immediately.

Tivoli

Yesterday I went to Tivoli, because I had to practice giving a tour there, and because it is a lovely little town high in the hills, and it was a good excuse to get out of Rome. I haven't been to Tivoli in about 2 years, and it was even more charming than I remembered.

I took the metro and then the bus out there, which took only an hour and a half (and only cost 2 euro!), and once we left the city, the drive was beautiful. At one point we even drove past a travertine quarry. Perhaps this is not as exciting to all of my readers as it is to me, but travertine is the main building stone of both the Romans and the Catholic Church (and hey, the Fascists used a lot of it too, but I am not overly fond of their architecture), and therefore figures quite heavily into most of my tours.

It was a pretty relaxing day, begun at Hadrian's Villa, which is full of mosquitos, and ended at the Villa d'Este, which is gorgeous. I don't mean to discount Hadrian's villa, it is a really remarkable example of how talented the Romans were with brick and mortar (even if they did cover it with marble), but we had to walk quite far in the hot sun to get there, and then the biting insects seemed to find me particularly tasty. The site itself was uncrowded and vast, which was a nice change from Rome, and the temperature was nearly perfect by the time we left in the late afternoon. We got into the Villa d'Este at the last entrance, which turned out to be wonderful, as we were there when the sun began to go down, and the Villa's panoramic views are all to the west.

Not overly exciting, but a beautiful and calm weekend trip.

Brush With Power, Part III

You readers are probably getting sick of me posting so many articles with the same title, but Rome seems to be innundated with the famous and powerful lately. This must be better than Christmas for the police here in Rome, because I have never seen so many cavalcades, so many uselessly blocked-off streets, so many shiny police motorbikes.

In any case, I was giving a tour earlier tonight, and as we entered Piazza della Rotonda for the Pantheon part of the tour, we found ourselves blocked out of not just the building, but the main part of the Piazza itself. It was almost 6.30pm at this time, and if the unusually early closing time hadn't tipped me off, the sheer number of policemen would have indicated that something BIG was happening at the Pantheon.

Without exaggeration, I can tell you there were no less than 4 separate police forces in the not-very-large piazza. The Carabinieri were there, of course, in kevlar vests, and they were assisted by the Polizia Municipale, who wore their regular uniforms, but also their special white pith-helmet-like helmets. Not to be outdone, the regular Polizia had sent a delegation, outfitted with state of the art walkie-talkies, presumably because it was too much to ask the 15 or so Polizia to walk the 8 steps between one another to relay information. On the opposite side of the piazza from my group were the Guarda di Finanza, Rome's tax police. No word on why they needed to be there, but they had a huge truck, and were massed like a little army. Also present were actual members of the Italian Army. Everyone was impeccably dressed, of course.

After attempting to at least give a description of the outside of the Pantheon to my tourists, I gave the group the choice: stay here and see who was coming by, or continue with the tour. My group opted to stay and wait, and at this point, I was more than willing to acquiesce. We didn't know what famous person was supposed to visit the Pantheon, but more importantly, we had no idea what time this person was meant to arrive. I thought of asking one of the many policemen, but they were all pretending that the very large crowd was not there.

Eventually, we began to hear whispers that it was Michelle Obama for whom all the fuss was being made, which seemed to validate our by now hour long wait outside the Pantheon. At one point, a woman who was fortunate enough to be in a hotel with a window looking out onto the piazza made a loud and excited noise, so that we all turned to look at the road, and most of us missed her near fall out the window, which had been the actual cause for the noise.

When, after an hour and a half of waiting, a cavalcade of Carabinieri motorbikes and bulletproof Suburbans (clearly imported straight from America, as they had Washington, D.C. plates) pulled into the square, everyone got their cameras ready and prepared to see the First Lady. However, the police seemed to have seriously overstated the danger to her person, because Mrs. Obama and her party hopped out of the cars and literally ran into the Pantheon. Very disappointed at not even being able to tell which one was Michelle, most of the crowd opted to continue waiting until she was done with her visit.

A few minutes later, a well-coiffed woman in a yellow dress came to the front of the Pantheon and waved at the crowd, which got a half-hearted cheer as most of the crowd looked at her and thought, 'Wait a second, that doesn't look like Michelle Obama...' It turns out it wasn't, it was just someone who from a distance somewhat resembled her. Eventually, she did come out and wave at the crowd from behind one of the bulletproof Suburbans, but most of the assembled mass seemed to feel a bit let down. We had all waited almost 2 hours for what turned out to be a 1 minute wave from a great distance.

I wish I could say how elegantly she was dressed, or if she looked the way she does in pictures, but all I could really see was that she was wearing a black dress, and she had her daughters with her. I saw the two of them hop quickly into the car as their mother's arm waved from behind it, and the best glimpse I got was of Michelle's profile through the tinted window of the car as it drove off. Perhaps it is because this was the only non-accidental sighting of a politician or politician's wife I have had in the last few weeks, but I think I prefer it when it happens serendipitously, when you don't know that someone will be passing directly in front of where you are, and neither does anyone else, so you are really getting an up-close (sort of) look at this celebrity when they aren't thinking about being a celebrity.

Brush with Power, Part II

A mere week after my close encounter with Silvio Berlusconi, the Don Juan of Italian politics, I was lucky enough to happen across the path of another very large police cavalcade at just the right time. I was waiting for a bus to the Vatican when I heard the sirens. It is very easy to distinguish between the siren sound made by an ambulance and the siren sound made by a Carabinieri motorbike, and thus easy to decide whether to feel grave or excited when you hear one.

This was definitely the excited kind of siren, and there were an awful lot of them, according to my less and less useful eardrums. Fortunately, Italian drivers, once they are in their vehicles, are not impressed by anything that holds up traffic, no matter if it is Sofia Loren, a horrible accident, or a giraffe. To the drivers, all of these have one thing in common: they are making us late! So, the cavalcade didn't get as much room on the street as they would have liked, as the traffic going the opposite direction continued to do so as if everything were normal. Due to this bottleneck, the 4 cars of the cavalcade had to pass by us waiting at the bus stop slowly enough that we could see who was inside.

What with the story being all over the news and the sheer number of cars being escorted by the police, we could all guess who was inside, and were not disappointed to see the glamorous wives of the G8 leaders (and Angela Merkel's husband, we shouldn't leave him out). The only people who were missing are generally the only two that people can name: the outrageously stylish Carla Bruni, first lady of France, and from my home country, Michelle Obama. Apparently, they are too cool to come to Rome with all the other G8 spouses; from what I can gather from the Italian news on RAI (where apparently you are only hired if you can deliver the entire news in less than a minute), Ms. Bruni will be going straight to L'Aquila to examine the effects of April's devastating earthquake (she was born and raised in Italy, in fairness), and Michelle Obama will be here at some indefinite later point.

Brush With Power

While I will be the first to tell you that Rome is by far the best city in Italy and is obviously the capital, I sometimes forget that being a capital city means that government activities are carried out there. You'd think I'd be more on top of this, as Rome is the 5th capital city I have lived in during the past 5 years, but then again, I rarely hang out on the Quirinal Hill, which is where most of the governing happens.

In one of those rare occasions, however, I was giving an Angels and Demons tour, part of which is a long walk on the Qurinal from Santa Maria della Vittoria to the Quirinal Palace. As we were walking, we heard the unmistakable sounds of a Carabinieri cavalcade. This is not an uncommon sound in Rome, as the Carabinieri love any chance to wear their fancy dress uniforms and ride motorcycles before and behind (and around, if they can fit on the tiny streets) whatever dignitary or celebrity or wealthy businessman is riding in the Alfa or Mercedes or BMW with the removable siren on it. Sometimes I think they must practice with empty cars, as they (and the Polizia Municipale, come to think of it) always seem to be cavalcading something.

In any case, this particular group was making a lot of noise, an obvious sign of having someone very important in the nice car. I moved my group out of the center of the street, to give them some room to pass, but nonetheless, the entourage slowed as it approached us. We stopped, ever eager for a celebrity siting, and were not disappointed. Who should be inside this car that the big man, the Italian Stallion, Silvio Berlusconi himself! I do what 33% of people do when they see someone famous: I stood very still, with a very goofy grin on my face, but one of my tourists was at least mobile enough to turn to me and yell, 'Oh look, he's waving at you!'

As the cavalcade rolled off, I could see that indeed, Prime Minister Berlusconi had been waving, but I can't decide if it is because he wanted me to vote for him or because he was trying to invite me to one of his legendary parties...