In which the Pope blesses my bar of hotel soap

Earlier this week, Liz’s deacon father pulled his Catholic strings and got her four tickets to see the Pope in Rome. She asked if I was interested, and I said something sophisticated like “Ooh ooh—pick me, pick MEEE!”

I may have zero connections to the Catholic Church (wait, my freshman year roommate was Catholic—does that count?) but I got super worked up about this Pope date.  What was I going to wear? What language should I speak to him in? (My Spanish is better than my Italian, but there would be less chance of me accidentally calling him “The Potato” if I spoke English.) What items should I bring to have blessed? Does a marble count as a sacred relic? What about a bar of soap you took from a hotel?

Fast forward to St. Peter’s Basilica, after we finally found Father Jim (Liz’s contact aka man with the plan):

tickets

We had our golden tickets and could finally enter the holy Willa Wonka factory! Except for one small problem: all of the security people kept shooing us away from the VIP area and back out into the giant sea of humanity that was wearing neon caps and waving Pope flags. After trying about six times, we were forced to accept our fate among them.

We tried to push as close as we could to one of the path barricades; we may be super far away from the stage, but he would make rounds in his Jeep and we would see him then.

People pressed against me on all sides, trying to force themselves ahead. “My daughter is up there,” one woman lied as she attempted to squeeze through a gap the size of a rabbit eyelash. The two Italian women in front of me actually started fighting, pushing each others’ shoulders as violently as they could in the limited space. The sun beat down relentlessly on our faces and seared into my eyes. I shedded the cardigan I had worn to be respectful; the Catholic aversion to shoulders is ridiculous anyway. The prong of an umbrella scratched the side of my face.

Sea of people in front of me

Only one more hour to go.

I squatted down to the level of cobblestone and bruised feet so I could breathe.  Father Jim continued on an endless rant about his life and research. After what seemed like forever, I heard a man shout “Eccolo! Eccolo!” (There he is!) and stood up, but I couldn’t see anything but chaos. The sea of people held their ipads, iphones, disposable kodaks, and snap-happys as high as they could over their heads. A man crowd-surfed his infant daughter up to the front to get kissed, but she didn’t make it in time. Pope Francis, when I saw him, was nothing but a glimpse of white cap on the other side of a stampeding zoo. When he passed, the woman directly behind me took to shouting “FRANCESCO!” as loud as she possibly could, as if he might hear her, turn his Pope-mobile around, and then venture into the crowd to find her. Then she lunged herself after him, sending me sprawling into the arms of short, dark-skinned priest. It was there, in frontal grind with that priest, that something broke in me. My eyes started to fill with tears, and I left the crowd to sit on the steps and listen to the Pope’s address from there.

 

Man trying to pass his baby up to the front

Father Jim took this for me because I was too short

Pope Francis spoke in Italian, but I found I could understand a good bit of what he was saying. It was particularly touching when he looked up from his notes and repeated “Tutti siamo eguale” (We are all equal). Simple, but nice to hear from the lips of a man whose mere presence inspires mass hysteria. He blessed us, our families, and all our sacred relics (yes, I have decided that marbles and hotel soaps do, in fact, count) and then disappeared.

 

The whole gane featuring silent brother and Father Jim

Before we left, Father Jim turned Steph’s plastic water bottle into holy water and sprinkled us with it. The rest of the day progressed in a comedy of errors that involved breaking fancy bottles of wine while running to catch our train, getting on the wrong train, and not realizing we were on aforementioned wrong train until its final stop.

So that was the Catholic misadventure. Now it’s time to talk about my more euphoric brush with Catholicism.

I mentioned a while back that I met a sister and she invited me to come jump on the convent trampoline whenever I wanted. Well, in typical Gabby form, I chickened out of going until our very last night in Tuscania, when I invited Liz and Dan to accompany me.

 

Sister Habib running back to class

We walked into the convent, and a young sister in blue (Habib from Egypt) saw us and giggled uncontrollably. When we asked her if we could jump on the trampoline, she giggled even more; then she led us through a library where nuns were taking their final exams and out into a beautiful yard starring, sure enough, a trampoline!

 

euphoria

Probably one of the top ten most euphoric experiences of my life, jumping on that convent trampoline. I felt like a little kid. It was also really fun to imagine nuns jumping on it. Gradually, news spread through the convent that there were three Americans jumping on the trampoline, and all the English speaking sisters started coming outside to meet us. Two of them offered to give us a tour.

 

nun chickens

They showed us their gardens, chickens, and pigs. We saw the laundry room where they handwash all their clothes. We said an Our Father in the chapel, poked around the “museum,” and studied a world map that marks all of their missions. Everywhere we went sisters would smile and fawn over us. I have never been around so many happy women in my life. Where had I gotten the idea that nuns were dour types?

 

pigs

The sisters at this convent come from all over the world. We met women from the Ukraine, South America, Australia… you name it. We also got to meet a ninety-year-old nun who hasn’t left the convent walls since she was fourteen! She says she wants to die there.

 

Liz meeting a laundry nun (they all have different vocations at the convent)

It was an incredibly eye opening and delightful experience. I’m so glad I finally got up to courage to go visit them, even if I did wait until my very last day in Tuscania to do it.

With our tour guides (and Dan's shadowy presence)

This post is long enough... I think I'll wait and tell you about Prague later. Stay gold, readerfolk!

In which Capri Sun is not a child's beverage served in an aluminum pouch.

The views in Sorrento and Capri are almost too beautiful for your mind to accept. You shouldn’t be able to afford, as a college student, a hotel with a view of a giant volcano plunging upward from the sea, framed by sunset. You shouldn’t be walking under lemon trees and lush, fuchsia vines on your way to buy a beer. It makes no sense that the water would be that blue, or that clear.

 

Sunrise from my hotel window

I didn’t get much sleep this weekend because I couldn’t bear to miss anything. I must have gotten out of bed eight times that first night in Sorrento, just to look out the window. Once, for fireworks. Another time to look at all the city lights on the ridge. Several phases of sunrise.

Port at Capri

We left for Capri at 6:30 in the morning, and we didn’t stop moving all day. We started with a boat tour that took us around the perimeter of the island—into grottos, under giant rock arches, and past light houses. The guide pointed out mansions dangling off the cliffs. “You know Dolce and Gabbana, the desginers? They live there.” or “The Gerbers, aka The Emperors of All Things Baby, own that one.”

At one point we climbed off the big boat and into four-person row boats. The water was low enough for us to squeeze through a small opening in the famous Blue Grotto and swim inside. Some strange feat of nature makes the entire cavern glow an electric blue, and the effect of the color and the Italian boat rower’s singing made the whole experience pretty surreal.

After taking a dip in the glowy water.

All in all the excursions in Capri are overpriced, but worth every penny at the same time. With salt crystals dried on our skin and in our hair, we climbed out of the boat and set out for Anacapri. After a terrifying bus ride, in which we all felt sure we would go toppling off the edge and onto the rocks, we hopped on a chair lift that took us all the way to the very top of the mountain. The views were hideous, as you can imagine. We soaked up as much of the panorama as possible, chugged some lemon ice water, and then commenced our descent to the bottom. Mad props to the girls who wore flip flops; I don’t think I would have made it without my fancy hiking shoes.

Two thumbs up for the top of the mountain.

We browsed lemoncello stands, grabbed the most affordable food we could find, and then spent time on a small pebble beach until it was time to catch our ferry back to Sorrento.

But the party didn’t stop there. In fact, it didn’t stop until about 2 am when we decided we couldn’t dance at the English Club anymore without dissolving entirely into sweat.

Sunday we hiked down to a little beach, where we laid out and jumped off cliffs to cool off. Normally I do not engage in such adventuresome activities, but I suppose the Sorrento sun worked some witch magic on me because I found myself willingly hurling my body off of ledges.

 

Proof of my uncharacteristic adventuresomeness

Synopsis: I think we sucked as much marrow out of our last weekend in Italy as humanly possible.

In which I get buried alive

I spent the majority of this afternoon climbing down into ancient Etruscan tombs and then out again, an exercise that proved as thought provoking as it was sweat inducing. Imagine descending a narrow shaft of steep steps into shadow, feeling the temperature drop with each foot you put forward. The smell gets old, and musty. The stairs creak. At the bottom you fumble for a button that will illuminate the tomb with a faded yellow light, by which you see stone beds, empty of their bones, and frescoes in red and green. All over the walls and ceiling, the stories they tell contain hunters and pregnant leopardesses, dolphins and sodomizers. The men drink wine out of jugs as large as they, and the women dance naked to the tune of the lyre.  The tombs tell the story of a people obsessed with celebrating death as wildly as they celebrated life. 

Frescoes inside a tomb.

Above ground, the necropolis spreads as far as the eye can see. Standing on the hill, you can look past the sweet yellow flowers, see the city of the living sprawled out before you like a quilt, and then look over your shoulder to see the blue haze of the Mediterranean. The Etruscans afforded their dead quite a view.

I am obsessed with these yellow flowers. They smell like delicious and wonderful had a baby.

Ancient urns are so commonplace in this field that people use them as seats and ashtrays. At the Etruscan Museum, which used to be a cardinal’s home, there are so many sarcophogi they spill onto the stairs and along the hallways, each face different, a likeness of the owner inside.

Urn action.

What if we were not so afraid of death? What if, instead of rushing our dying to hospitals to be dealt with clinically among beeping boxes, instead of viewing death as some sort of unnatural atrocity, we were able to celebrate it together as the next great journey? I believe there is a lesson to be learned from the legacy of these buck-wild Etruscans. As I climbed out of the last tomb and into the blinding sun, I felt myself turn into flakes of ash, sail over the ridge on a gust of air, and join the beauty below.

Just gorgeous.

Tomorrow we leave for the Amalfi Coast, where everyone and their mother who has ever been to Italy has told me to go. We're staying in Sorrento and spending a day in Capri... Can't wait to report all the adventures : )

Live fearlessly, loved ones!

Class Assignment: "The Others and I"

My teacher assigned us to write a short essay about culture differences we've perceived between America and Italy. Since I doubt I'll have time to write a new blog post today, I thought I'd throw it at ya.

The Others and I:

A Satire (kind of)

            Mei, the lean Asian woman at the head of the group, leads us out into the busy roundabout as Fiats screech and swerve around us like chickens in the process of being slaughtered. I repeat my standard prayer for the fourteenth time that day: Dear Lord, please do not let me become toeless, headless, or flat as a lasagna noodle today, Amen, and scurry behind her, holding my breath as a red one whips by, 1.5 millimeters from my heel. There are crosswalks here in Tuscania, Italy— they are ubiquitous, in fact—but I have yet to see any local use them, and Mei is no exception. Surely there are also driving regulations; but rather than comply, Italian drivers prefer to dart and dash around each other like ants in a disturbed mound and park any way and anywhere they please—slanted, on top of each other, or next to the peaches in the super market.

            The American in me cringes at this. Back home, we know the rules and we follow them—when we’re not texting on our smart phones or decimating a double McPorkRind, of course. We pause at the edge of a crosswalk, wave politely at the slowing SUV, and go along our way secure in the knowledge that we will not become road kill. Here in Italy, on the other hand, if I wait at a crosswalk for the cars to stop and let me cross, I will be there all day. I know this for a fact, having spent my entire last Tuesday on the side of Strada Provinciale, attempting to respectfully stare down a blur of passing Fiats.

            Being a proper Southern girl, I never judge, and so I turn to a culturally sacred idiom to explain the horrendous behavior of these Italian drivers: Bless their hearts, it must be how they are raised. All those years under fascist whoevers must have so scarred the poor dears that they are no longer capable of following any rule, regardless of how sensible it may be. Or maybe defiance runs in their thick Italian blood, the way benevolence and understanding do in mine.

            Whatever the case, we Americans have no such deficiency of reason or respect. No, I once saw a man file back and forth through the winding partitions of an empty Starbucks line for twenty minutes before placing his order for a tall peppermint mocha. Yes, he could have defied protocol, walked around or under the black strings and straight up to the counter, but this man was no heathen. Watching him weave back and forth, back and forth, growing winded and yet never wavering in resolve, my chest swelled with flag-raising pride. That man is what America is all about.

            I am afraid Italians will never understand this, however. They are too bitter, too entitled. In the grocery store this morning, for example, it took me forty-five minutes to check out because old women kept cutting in front of me. Old women! One is used to looking to their elders for guidance and behavioral conventions, but even the elderly here are incorrigible. No blue-blooded American would ever consider cutting in line at the grocery or blazing through a red light, just because they had time to squeeze by before getting t-boned. No, we wait patiently for our turn. Even if it is 2 am on a rural highway and the only other living thing in sight is our reflection in the rear-view mirror, we will wait for that green. We are civilized.       

            At first I gave Italians the benefit of the doubt when it came to ignoring traffic signals; I told myself they were all color blind. However, after extensive Google research and analysis, I have discovered that this is, alas, not the case. They willingly deny the sacred stop of red, God bless their souls. I cannot imagine what my friends and family back home will think when I tell them all this upon my return. Should I survive the month here, despite the general anarchy, I shall paint for them a picture of soul-shuddering depravity they will never forget!

Congrats on making it through that! Here's a random picture of a horse in Florence.

In which I drown Frederico in a volcanic lake

On Friday we accepted a ride from the now infamous Frederico and took a short day trip to Bolsena Lake. It was gorgeous—blue water, volcanic ridges in the distance, sail boats, large tan women obstructing your every photograph… Absolute loveliness.

 

This woman literally felt the need to obstruct my every photo.

But we all know how Frederico rolls now... He must destroy loveliness.

Here are some transcripts of lake-side conversation, courtesy of my secretary. Be sure to read Frederico’s voice with a heavy accent.

Frederico: Where in the United States are you from?

Me: Alabama.

Frederico: Do you have shoes there?

Me: Yes.

Frederico: Electricity?

Frederico: What do you study?

Me: Creative Writing.

Frederico: So you are not very smart?

Me: What do you study?

Frederico: Japanese.

Me: Oh, interesting? What got you interested in Japan?

Frederico: Porn.

I guess technically I could have cropped her out of this one, but why.

It was conversations like this that made us wonder why he had been so willing to give up his Friday to escort us to the lake. But despite these moments in which I wanted to bury Frederico’s face in the black volcanic sand, we actually had a very nice day laying out, throwing the frisbee, and sipping prosecco in the shade. Italy continues to be a big ol' cup of chamomile tea for the soul.

PS. Here's the random little girl that just sat down next to me at San Marco.

Insta friends! (I think.) She said something to me but I couldn't understand her.