Urban Reverie's Travels

Every second Wednesday on my pay day I open up an Excel spreadsheet. I look at my various bank accounts, count how much cash there is in my wallet, check my superannuation balance and see the current market value of my share portfolio. I enter all the figures into the spreadsheet, I deduct whatever balance I have outstanding on my credit card and my marvellous little spreadsheet spits out some cute little graphs showing the progress of my net worth.

I made this spreadsheet not only because I am a tight-fisted lucre-loving money-grubber. It is because I have a goal - financial independence.

My aim is to have a net worth of a certain amount by the time I am sixty so I can retire and spend the rest of my life travelling the world, the returns on my various savings and investments funding my travel. I’m pleased to say that I am on track.

Every one of my overseas adventures serves only to increase my ardour to see as much of this world as I possibly can before I die. It is a drug and not a terribly bad addiction to have. A typical human being only lives for one thousand months. That’s not many. Each of us was dead for an eternity before we were born and each of us will be dead for an eternity after we die.

That’s a shame because this planet is amazing. It is perhaps the most interesting of all the planets known to humanity. Think of the staggering diversity of landscapes, of living creatures, of human cultures and languages, of climates, of cuisine. I yearn to experience as much of this little blue dot floating through the galaxy as I can.

So I boarded my Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Sydney with bitter-sweetness. Bitter because I was sad that this adventure was coming to an end, sweet because I count myself so incredibly fortunate to be able to have gone on said adventure.

I reflected upon the places I visited. Slovenia was a definite highlight not just of this trip but of all my trips. My fond memories of Slovenia shall be a source of joy for the rest of my life. The breathtaking other-worldly alpine scenery; the open, honest, helpful, outdoorsy people; the hearty, filling farmhouse cuisine. Top marks, Slovenia.

Yet on the plane back to Sydney I was filled with renewed gratitude to be Australian. This was unusual considering that I had previously made serious plans to move to Europe because I had felt that Australian grass wasn’t green enough.

If you travel, and only travel, to countries where the people have more civilised conditions of existence than in Australia - the green social-democratic welfare states of Northern Europe, say, or the futuristic high-tech utopias of East Asia - of course you are going to think that Australia is a bit crap. When you travel a bit more widely, an Australian would realise that in the grand scheme of things Aussies have it pretty good.

Australians are honest. Unlike in Italy a tourist can walk into the shop of a major mobile telco and be quite confident that the employees won’t try to rip them off. Restaurateurs will not sell you stale microwaved pasta and then have the nerve to whack an extortionate and unadvertised “service” charge on your bill.

Australians are largely law-abiding and our police are generally effective. Don’t get me wrong - I am no cop lover. I will not defend the human rights abuses some Australian police engage in, especially against Aboriginal folk. But the coppers have one job to do - to deter crime and keep people and property safe - and in Australia they do that job better than in some European countries like Italy. There is no way that Australian police forces would ever tolerate the teeming hordes of pickpockets, con artists, professional beggars and thieves who infest cities like Rome and Florence. Those scumbags would get their backsides kicked from here to kingdom come if they tried that stuff in an Australian city. An honourable mention also goes to Australian driving standards. They aren’t up to the standard of Northern European countries but Australian roads are far safer places to be than Italian roads.

Australians are clean. Some people say that Australian cities can be sterile. I agree. But I will take an antiseptic city over one with piles of putrescent garbage on every corner like Naples.

Australians are generally friendly and helpful. Sometimes our friendliness is just a facade, our cheerfulness often feels a bit forced, but there are few better countries to be in if you need to ask someone for directions or advice. Most customer service staff are obliging and our public servants generally treat citizens who use their services with professionalism and respect. Hungary could learn a thing or two from Australia.

The flight home from Doha was pleasant. I had good company. The guy in the seat next to me was from Bosnia, he was flying to Australia to visit family who migrated many years ago. This man was a professional boxer. He was dressed in a polyester tracksuit, the uniform of a Swedish boxing club, with a chunky silver chain dangling low down his hairy chest. He was friendly. He asked lots of questions about Australia in broken English and I asked him lots of questions about Bosnia, being mindful not to stray into the minefield of Bosnia’s ethnic animosities. He practiced his English with me and I was glad to help out.

There was only one thing - he stank like a rubbish tip. Oh goodness, I am writing this three years later and I still recall the stench perfectly. I doubt he had showered for at least a week before boarding the flight. No no no - at least an entire month. I toyed with the idea of sticking my foam ear plugs up my nostrils but I was afraid it would cause offence.

The plane passed over Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, in the middle of the night. I looked down upon the city that I had visited only nine months before, my first foray into South Asia.

I got a couple of hours of that strange sleep I have on planes, that light, unsatisfying slumber where I look at my watch, close my eyes, open my eyes again and see that my watch has advanced two hours despite the absence of the feeling that I have slept. I am jealous of people who can sleep well on aircraft because I can’t.

As the plane approached Sydney from the southwest I saw it - the smoke, a thick grey blanket draped over the Blue Mountains to the north. The worst bushfires in Australia’s history had started raging in earnest while I was in Europe and they would continue to rage for months afterwards, destroying entire towns and hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of forest.

The flight attendants walked up the aisles handing out Australian landing cards that all arriving passengers must complete and hand to the Australian Border Force. The Spanish Inquisition was never quite so intrusive as the Australian landing card. The amount of detail required is astounding. No other country I have visited asks so much. Have you visited a farm recently? Are you carrying any medication? Do you have a criminal conviction? How much cash are you carrying? What address are you staying at when you arrive? Have you ever had tuberculosis? What’s your email address? What did you have for breakfast on the morning of 12 May 1998?

My smelly Bosnian friend was flummoxed. His English wasn’t very good, he couldn’t understand the form or my explanations of each question. Thankfully there was a Croatian woman in the row in front of us who helped him.

One question stumped him however - the one about what your address in Australia will be. He didn’t know. His cousin was coming to meet him at the airport and drive him to his place. He had no reason to memorise the address. All he knew is that it was somewhere in Sydney.

I tried using the on-board wi-fi to go onto Facebook to send his cousin a message. Unfortunately on-board wi-fi is not yet a very good technology. The lag was appalling and the connection kept dropping out. I offered to call his friend when we got off the plane but he didn’t have his number. I hope the officious jobsworths at the Australian Border Force gave him an easy time.

I waited forever for my baggage, par for the course at Kingsford Smith Airport, and emerged from the international terminal to catch a bus to Mascot station. As soon as I exited through the sliding doors I instantly coughed my guts up from all the bushfire smoke and desperately searched through my backpack for my asthma puffer. I would continue to cough my guts up for the next two months until the drought finally broke around Australia Day, the much wished for rains finally quenching all the fires.

I took the bus to Mascot station, a train to Central then another train home to Summer Hill - my tightarse method of travelling to the airport in reverse. I had my ceremonial beer at the local pub, a schooner of Resch’s while watching all the trains go past, and stepped across the threshold of my apartment four weeks after I went across it the other way.

Little did anyone know that a little over a month later a once-in-a-century pandemic would start, interrupting my future travel plans for nearly three years.

There would be a lot of catching up to do.

I left Rome in the gloomy rainy November dawn. It was very early, the streets were uncharacteristically quiet. Street lights glinted in the greasy puddles on the bitumen. The metro ride to Termini station was uncrowded, perhaps even pleasant.

I bought my ticket at a Trenitalia ticket machine at Termini, the terminal spitting out a stiff cardboard ticket of immense size, even more substantial than an airline boarding pass. I passed through the tall glass gates to catch the Leonardo Express, the train from Termini to Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Fiumicino some thirty kilometres to the west.

Trenitalia has no business calling this train the Leonardo “Express”. Yes, it runs non-stop from Termini to Fiumicino. Yes, it is a very nice train with high-backed seats, plentiful luggage space, and more than enough power points and USB ports. But it crawls along the tracks the entire way. The Leonardo Express shares the same tracks as all-stations suburban services and consequently gets stuck behind the slow trains. I felt that I could have walked to the airport quicker.

I was rather impressed by Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Once again I felt that eerie cognitive dissonance tinged with jealousy - how does such a dysfunctional country with such corrupt politicians and unstable governments as Italy manage to build such amazing infrastructure?

A cute little driverless people mover took me swiftly to a satellite terminal where I waited for my Qatar Airways flight to Doha. As the plane took off I got a good view of the mouth of the Tiber and the town of Civitavecchia, once Rome’s port, before the scene was obscured by the low clouds.

The clouds cleared by the time we crossed the Ionian Sea and passed over Greece. The Greek scenery down below was superb - stunning coastlines, soaring mountains, a cobalt blue sea studded with alluring islands, peninsulas and isthmuses. The plane also passed other Athens. I now understood why Athens has such intense air pollution. The city is a crowded metropolis of mid-rise buildings squeezed into a bowl-shaped basin surrounded by a ring of high hills. There scarcely seemed to be an acre of green space in the entire urban area save for around the Acropolis.

The clouds and desert haze returned somewhere after Cyprus. I passed the time watching Head Full of Honey starring Nick Nolte, a cloyingly saccharine film about a grandfather with dementia taking his granddaughter on a railway adventure across Europe to Venice. It wasn’t Old Nick’s best work. As schmalzy as the movie was, it brought back memories of my own beloved Granddad’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.

The plane landed at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar shortly after sunset. I had a wait for a couple of hours in this rather pleasant, well laid out airport. I took the opportunity to stretch my legs, go for a long walk around the terminal and ride the people mover just for laughs to mentally and physically prepare myself for the long, long stretch home.

There was something about Rome that sapped my energy, my lust for life. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was. Perhaps it was the beggars, scam artists and pickpockets that infest every tourist attraction. Perhaps it was the terrible public transport – by far the worst I have seen in Europe – that made getting around the city a blasted chore. Perhaps it was the insane traffic with kamikaze drivers of farty little Fiats pretending they were playing Super Mario Kart. Perhaps it was the grime, the disorder, the rip-off restaurants, the rudeness and aggression of many of the people. Perhaps it was all of these things combined.

Whatever the cause, I was sick of it. So the grey morning of Thursday, 14 November 2019 was yet another day when I took my sweet time getting ready to emerge from the Empire Suites, my last full day in Europe before the pandemic.

Stolpersteine on Viale Giulio Cesare

As I left the apartment building on Viale Giulio Cesare I noticed three little brass plaques embedded in the footpath. I bent over and took a closer look. On the plaques were inscriptions in Italian – basic biographical details of the lives of three people who used to live in the building. Giulio Mortera was born in 1870 and was murdered in 1943 in Auschwitz a week after being arrested in Rome. His daughter Jole, born in 1904, was also deported to Auschwitz and was killed at an unknown time and place. His wife Virginia, born in 1866, was arrested and murdered on the same days as her husband.

We all know of the horrors of the Holocaust in the abstract, but to see these unassuming little plaques telling me that I am staying in the same building as where Holocaust victims lived was a profoundly moving experience. The very stairs I had just descended were also used by SS officers to drag innocent people to their slaughter. To be honest, I had no idea that the tentacles of the Holocaust reached this far south – I knew that Northern Italy became a Nazi puppet state after the coup that deposed Mussolini’s Fascist regime, but I didn’t know that this puppet state, the so-called Italian Social Republic, went as far south as Rome.

There are plaques like these in pavements all over Europe. They are called Stolpersteine, German for “stumbling stones” – there is a project to install a Stolperstein outside the homes of every Holocaust victim.

I caught a very crowded metro train to the Colosseum. As I tried to alight from the train at Colosseo station I had to fight against a scrum of boarding passengers who refused to let people get off first. “Let people get off the train first, you f#$%ing morons!” I admonished. I was forced to lunge between two people just to exit the carriage and for my troubles some jerk pushed my back with such force that I almost fell onto the platform. God damn it, Italy.

I waited in an eternal queue to buy my ticket to enter the Colosseum and then climbed the stairs to the upper galleries of the stadium. I would like to say that the Colosseum took my breath. It didn’t. I had seen it in so many photographs and television programmes that I felt no sense of wonder. The Colosseum is also much smaller than I expected. I thought you would be able to host a football match in it, but it’s probably only large enough for a beach volleyball game – the oval playing area is eighty metres long and forty-six metres wide. (For comparison, the Sydney Cricket Ground is a hundred and eighty-six metres long and a hundred and forty-five metres wide.) Then there was the fact that everyone else took their sweet time taking the same photos over and over again and not being quick about it, thereby blocking me from trying to get around the place.

The Hypogeum of the Colosseum

Most of the field surface has been removed revealing the hypogeum, the intricate system of corridors, dressing rooms, service areas, trapdoors and the like through which the gladiators, animals, performers and condemned criminals were transported up to the surface. To be honest, I found this the only interesting thing about the Colosseum.

The Colosseum is right outside the Forum, the civic heart of Ancient Rome. Between the Colosseum and the Forum are two triumphal arches, the Arch of Constantine and the Arch of Titus, the latter being the inspiration for the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The Arch of Titus is on the Via Sacra, the ceremonial axis of the Forum and essentially Ancient Rome’s main street. The Via Sacra still leads to the visitor’s entrance to the Forum.

The Via Sacra also contains the greatest concentration of scoundrels in all of Italy. I was accosted three times by these miscreants on the short walk from the Colosseum to the Forum. They are utterly merciless. Florence was teeming with these con artists too but at least there they had the good sense to take a firm yet polite “no, thanks” for an answer. Their counterparts in Rome were not so diffident.

Their schtick is the same as the ones who hang around the Trevi Fountain. They will step into your path with astounding dexterity and make it impossible for you to step around them. They will draw attention to your shoes. “Hi man, your shoes are black, just like Africa. I am from Africa. Where are you from?” And I suspect that while your gaze is directed at your shoes, they or an accomplice will rifle your pockets or backpack and rob you blind.

I was having none of it. I managed to extricate myself from the first two with some difficulty but the third boxed me in against a retaining wall along the side of the Via Sacra.

“Just leave me alone, I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“Why? Why don’t you like talking to the black man? Are you racist? You’re racist!”

“For f#$%’s sake, just let me pass!”

He then shouted to all the passers-by. “Look everyone, here’s a racist! He doesn’t like talking to the black man! Look everyone, a RACIST!”

“I’m not a f#$%ing racist, I just have the right to walk around this city without you miserable mangy mongrels blocking me wherever I go!” I shouted back.

“RACIST! This man’s a RACIST!”

He then let me walk away and he didn’t disturb me any longer. A Scottish family visiting Rome were passing, heard the exchange, saw that I was a little shaken and asked if I was OK. They let me walk with them the rest of the way to the ticket office.

When I reached the ticket office I saw a little corner in the retaining wall, stood there off to the side of the streaming crowds and discreetly looked back. I saw what they were trying to do. These rascals would only ever approach single travellers, occasionally couples. I saw one of these pieces of trash try to manoeuvre his hands towards a possible victim’s watch but never quite getting there. Then one of these contemptible criminals saw that I was looking at him. He flipped me the bird and gave me a look that let me know in no uncertain terms that I would most likely end up at the bottom of the Tiber river if I kept watching him.

The emperor's personal stadium at Domitian's Palace

Discretion was the better part of valour so I bought a ticket and entered the Forum. First I explored Palatine Hill. This is one of the original Seven Hills of Rome. It was the site of the emperor’s residence and is the place from which the English word “palace” is derived. Most of Palatine Hill is taken up by the ruins of Domitian’s Palace. This palace had its own stadium for the sole pleasure of the emperor. Though most of the roofs had gone, many of the walls and much of the brilliant white marble floors still remained.

Next to the Palatine Hill in a valley is the Circus Maximus where chariot races were held. The outline of the racecourse is still visible but it is now surrounded on all sides by busy roads.

Next to the palace on Palatine Hill is the Farnese Gardens, one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe and founded in the Renaissance by a cardinal. The gardens contain a belvedere from which a view can be obtained over the Forum and the Colosseum in the valley below.

View of Forum and Basilica of Maxentius from Farnese Gardens

I then descended from the gardens down to the Forum. The Forum is strange. It is a stunning collection of ruins in various stages of dilapidation, from “still almost intact” to “an unidentifiable jumble of rocks”. The strange thing though is that it is surrounded on all sides by a very much intact city.

Here’s an analogy. The city of Sydney was founded in 1788 when the British arrived on the First Fleet; they established the colony on the shores of Sydney Cove around what is now Circular Quay – this area from the very beginning was the city centre and it still is; the area around Circular Quay probably has Australia’s greatest concentration of skyscrapers.

Now imagine that for whatever reason, some time in the nineteenth century, the area around Circular Quay had been abandoned. Meanwhile, the rest of the city was still active and Sydney grows up and expands around the abandoned area, but Circular Quay was left to fall into ruins. This is sort of what happened to the Forum.

In most European cities of ancient pedigree, the classical heart is still the city centre; whatever ancient buildings still exist are part of the urban fabric and sit alongside newer buildings. In Rome, however, the Forum seems detached from the life of the city, an archaeological park for the amusement of tourists, almost like a zoo but with columns and pediments instead of giraffes and elephants.

It makes sense when you learn more about the history of Rome. After the Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD, Rome declined. And I mean, declined. The city lost most of its population, about seventy-five percent. The people who remained in the city clustered around the bend inside the Tiber river to the west of the Forum; this area became the new heart of Rome. Not only was the Forum abandoned, but over the centuries the Catholic Church thought it would be a smashing idea to pillage the Forum of stone with which to build their magnificent cathedrals and basilicas elsewhere.

Temple of Castor and Pollux at the Roman Forum

Hence the modern visitor to the Forum can see the eerie sight of a tympanum teetering on crumbling columns at the Temple of Castor and Pollux; the Basilica of Maxentius, an enormous basilica with half of the building missing revealing huge vaults enclosing the interior that bring to mind an empty egg carton cut lengthwise and turned upside down; and more jumbles of stones, foundations, crypts, steps and walls than you could possibly remember.

The Roman Forum was interesting enough but I had to keep exploring. I was accosted by two more ruffians asking about my shoes along Via dei Fori Imperiali. Thankfully this street is wide and windswept; it was easier to get away from them than in the narrow confines of the Via Sacra. When I got to Piazza Venezia I saw a building with a sign – “CARABINIERI”. A police station!

I went in, not to report a crime, just that I was curious about what these scam artists are up to. Surely they aren’t pickpockets. I don’t know much about picking people’s pockets, but these people were too loud and too aggressive – wouldn’t pickpockets prefer not to draw attention to themselves? They weren’t trying to sell me anything, they didn’t seem to have any wares with them. So what were they up to?

My extensive travels in over two dozen countries have led me to formulate Urban Reverie’s Theorem of Law Enforcement. It’s a simple rule: “the more corrupt, dysfunctional, authoritarian, ineffective, violent, incompetent or lazy a police force is, the smarter their uniform will be.” It is an ironclad law, totally beyond refutation. Take the Netherlands for instance, probably the most liberal, safest, least corrupt, best governed country on earth. Their police wear these horrible slobby tracksuit jackets with fluorescent stripes on them that make them look like roadworkers. Or how about Sweden? Their police wear these dorky little brimless hats that make them look like McDonald’s employees.

On the other hand, the uniforms of the Carabinieri are very, very, very smart.

I entered the beautiful yet dim police station. It really was a work of art. I walked across the tiled floor to the timber counter with its brass bars. Behind the counter were three Carabinieri officers. They looked splendid in their crisp black uniforms with epaulettes and white sashes and red stripes down the seams of the trousers.

The three officers – two men and one woman, if I remember rightly – were gossiping among themselves languidly. I think “languid” is the right word. If they had had any less energy they would have been comatose and I would have had to call 112 for an ambulance.

After a small eternity one deigned to finally notice my presence. I explained in my very broken Italian – none of them could speak a word of English – that I wasn’t there to report a crime, I just wanted to know what these men hanging around tourist attractions were trying to do.

“Nero?” one of them asked.

“Si. Nero,” I nodded.

Another of them yawned. “Si. Tutti nero.,” he said mid-yawn.

They tried to explain in Italian what they were doing but I couldn’t understand, so one of them turned Marcel Marceau and tried to explain by mime – something to do with watches; he kept stroking his fingers around his wrist with a circle.

So they were watch thieves! That explained it.

“But what are you doing about it? There are criminals out there right now almost within sight of this building trying to rob tourists left, right and centre! So why are each of you just sitting here doing nothing but yawning and gossiping? There is crime to fight out there! So get to work, you lazy bludgers! What the f#$k are the taxpayers of Italy paying you to do?” I wish I had said. But I didn’t. Mainly because my Italian isn’t good enough. The Carabinieri officers seemed to really resent my presence and the fact that I had interrupted their somnolent chatting, so I left.

Vittoriano

Across the Piazza Venezia is a monument of stupendous proportions, the Vittoriano. It looks ancient but it was only completed in 1935 in honour of Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of unified Italy. The Vittoriano is an orgy of ornamentation, a massive faux-Classical wedding cake of columns and quadrigae, a marble pile sitting on top of a hill of immense stairs. It almost hurts to look at the Vittoriano, not because it is necessarily ugly but because of its scale and the elaborate, ostentatious decorations covering every available square inch.

The sun was getting very low in the sky and I hadn’t had lunch yet. I came across a restaurant on either Via del Plebiscito or Corso Vittore Emanuele II. There was an English menu on the wall outside. I knew it wasn’t going to be great but I didn’t care, I was hungry. I think I ordered a lasagna with salad.

It was one of the vilest meals I ever ate, the customer service was blatantly rude and disgusting, my food took forever to arrive, and of course there was a massive hidden service charge added to my bill. I grudgingly paid and as I left, I finally figured it out – when in Italy, never, ever, ever eat at a restaurant that has an English menu. If you ever come across a restaurant in Italy that has any sort of English menu or signage, run and do not look back lest ye turn into a pillar of salt. Even if you can’t read a single word of Italian, don’t even think of going into such a restaurant. Don’t! I regret that it took me until my final day in Italy for me to finally learn this law.

Pantheon

A short distance north is the Pantheon. Visiting the Pantheon was a sure-fire antidote to the bitter taste in my mouth from that so-called “restaurant”. The Pantheon was originally a pre-Christian temple to all the Ancient Roman gods – “pan” being Ancient Greek for “all” and “theos” meaning “god” – but as was their wont, the Roman Catholic Church decided to adapt existing Ancient Roman religion to their faith. Stealing Christmas and Easter and the worship of virgins from the Ancient Roman religion wasn’t enough, they had to take their buildings too.

And what a building. The dome is so vast it is impossible to capture in a single photograph from the inside. In the centre of the dome is an opening to the sky; there is a drain on the floor beneath the opening to remove any rain that might enter the church. The Pantheon is also the final resting place of several members of the former Italian royal family; monarchists have placed wreaths at some of the sarcophagi which are placed at intervals around the edge of the vast circular interior.

I took a leisurely evening stroll through the centre of Rome. There was the Torre Argentina – nothing to do with the South American country; it’s a city square that has a concentration of ancient ruins in a sunken garden surrounded by streets on all sides. There was the Column of Marcus Aurelius with its frieze spiralling up the column. There was Palazzo Chigi, the rather plain residence of the Prime Minister. There was Piazza Navona, a very long square buzzing with life featuring the beautiful Fountain of Moro.

Tiber River at St Peter's Basilica at night

I reached the Tiber river. I did not see it foaming with much blood. Enoch Powell was lying. It’s not the biggest river I have seen nor the most beautiful per se. It does have, however, some amazing views around it. There is the Castel Sant’Angelo, a riverside fortress, and looking downstream an appealing vista presents itself – a long view up the wide boulevard of Via della Conciliazione to the softly illuminated bulk of St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The river is crossed at regular intervals by stone bridges with attractive arches all artistically lit.

It wasn’t far back to my hotel room in Prati so I walked. All the better to avoid having to travel on Rome’s deficient public transport system. I stopped off at a restaurant down the street from my room which specialised in Neapolitan cuisine. Rome, being the national capital, attracts residents from all over Italy to work in the public service or in the many Catholic Church institutions or to study at its universities, so all of Italy’s regional cuisines are amply represented in the Eternal City.

Paccheri with three meat sauce in a Neapolitan restaurant in Rome

The restaurant in the basement of an apartment building was great. It was packed. I didn’t have a reservation but they let me in. A band played some jaunty tarantella, the traditional folk dance music of Naples. I started off with antipasto – flower of pumpkin, mozzarella and anchovy puff – like a samosa, but Italian. The main course was paccheri – smooth tubular pasta about the same diameter as a radiator hose – smothered in a rich three-meat tomato sauce. For dessert I had pastiera Napoletana, a dense tart made of ricotta and dried fruit dusted with icing sugar.

It was certainly a change from the rip-off merchant who dared to sell me a stale microwaved lasagna and limp, rancid salad a few hours earlier. The feast was also a most fitting farewell to Italy. Italy has many problems – corruption, ineffective government, petty crime and dishonesty, regional inequality – but my word, the food, the wine, the beauty, the art, the history and its people’s love of life and laughter must go some way to make up for it, surely.

Bravo, Italia, bravo.

Stolpersteine on Viale Giulio Cesare

Eastern end of Circus Maximus

Arch of Constantine

Arch of Titus on the Via Sacra

Column of Marcus Aurelius

Castel Sant'Angelo

Remains of temple at the Roman Forum

Flower of pumpkin, mozzarella and anchovy puffs

Pasteria Napoletana

The morning of Wednesday, 13 November 2019 was yet another dismal, drizzly morning in Rome. Yet again I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about leaving my comfortable hotel room. But leave I must for I had an important date.

On Monday afternoon when I visited St Peter’s Basilica I approached a couple of Swiss Guards on sentry duty at one of the many checkpoints controlling access into Vatican City. I asked nicely if they could please spare me a ticket to the weekly audience with the Pope on Wednesday morning and they gladly obliged, giving me a little pink slip of photocopied paper. The Swiss Guards are the defence force of the State of Vatican City. They look decidedly un-martial with their baggy blue, red and yellow uniforms, berets cocked on their head, perfect grooming, smooth complexions, winsome smiles and sweet, polite demeanour. Would that all the world’s militaries were like the Swiss Guards! This planet would be a much more peaceful place.

In typical Urban Reverie fashion I arrived at the audience with Pope Francis a little bit late at about half past nine. The audience was an intimate affair, just me, His Holiness and about ten thousand other people.

On most Wednesday mornings when the Pope is in town, His Holiness will hold an audience in St Peter’s Square with the faithful and the not-so-faithful but merely curious. You need a ticket from the Swiss Guards which is free for anyone who asks. The Pope will make a speech to those assembled, his face shown on big screens for the benefit of those up the back. Portions of the speech will be translated by other priests in various languages; I recall English, German, Portuguese and Spanish being used. Most of the Pope’s speech will be only in Italian and left untranslated.

With the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Francis is now the most famous person I have ever seen with my own eyes. He was a long way away; a mere cream-coloured dot on a podium surrounded by black-robed priests, but I saw him nonetheless. The crowd was silent and respectful; dotted through the multitude were various national flags flown by groups of people who had come all this way just to see His Holiness – Argentina, the Philippines, the Czech Republic. About half of the immense expanse of St Peter’s Square was occupied by the audience.

I must admit I was slightly disappointed. I sort of half-expected that the majesty of the moment would fill me with reverence and awe while I would be struck by a lightning bolt from Pentecostal skies like what happened to St Paul on the road to Damascus and God Himself would say to me in a booming voice, “Urban, my dear child, give up thy sinful ways and follow my path of righteousness!” Instead I spent most of my time wiping the drizzle off my glasses with my handkerchief, trying to decipher Pope Francis’s Italian – the Duolingo course only got me so far – and wondering when the speech would ever end.

The audience did finally come to a close; the Pope led the crowd through the Lord’s Prayer in Latin – the text was helpfully printed on the back of my ticket – and His Holiness blessed the crowd, also in Latin. The audience had the opportunity to meet the Pope afterwards; many had brought along religious items such as Bibles and Rosary beads to be blessed by Pope Francis, but I was getting wet and hungry so I went off to a nearby municipal covered market to marvel at all the amazing fresh produce and have some lunch.

I had booked a ticket to the Vatican Museums for the half past twelve slot. I joined the long queue and was granted entry. The next five hours were a blur. The sheer amount of art, sculpture, architecture, artefacts – it was too much to take in. It was far more overwhelming than the Uffizi in Florence. The Vatican Museums are dizzying; I passed from gallery to gallery, corridor to corridor, courtyard to courtyard and only remember little bits of it, there was far too much for one brain to absorb in just one day.

Note that the correct name is Vatican Museums; plural, not singular – they truly are several museums in one complex. I would advise visitors to set aside an entire day and book a morning slot, half past twelve didn’t leave me enough time before closing.

The range of exhibits covers the entire gamut of human civilisation; from Egyptian mummies to post-modernist paintings, from Ancient Greek statues to Renaissance frescoes. The museums aren’t just galleries of Catholic religious art; they are also ethnographic museums; statuaries; natural history museums; contemporary art galleries. The Vatican Museums are every great museum in the world distilled into one location.

My favourite part of the Vatican Museums was the Gallery of Maps. This is a long, elaborately decorated, barrel-vaulted corridor with enormous painted maps along both sides; each map depicting a different region of the Italian peninsula. This gallery was commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1580. I spent at least half an hour just marvelling at the detail and skill. By the cartographic standards of the sixteenth century these maps are incredibly detailed and accurate. I found all the places on the Italian peninsula that I had visited and travelled through so far.

A little further on I entered the Sistine Chapel. I took a few steps into the hall, extracted my phone from my pocket and took a photo. One second later a security guard came up to me and snarled at me. No photos! Photography forbidden! I apologised profusely but he didn’t seem mollified. I didn’t see any sign prohibiting photography in the Sistine Chapel but apparently it is. He didn’t make me delete the photograph from my phone so I have included this TOP SECRET ULTRA-ILLEGAL CLASSIFIED INFORMATION photo here for your enjoyment.

I found the Sistine Chapel rather unpleasant. It wasn’t that Michelangelo’s art wasn’t fantastic; of course it was. But the chapel was much dimmer than I expected; I had to squint to see some of the ceiling frescoes. Also, the priests running the show were simply horrible. There was a strict rule of silence in there, but of course people would whisper to each other in hushed reverential tones about being surrounded by such amazing art. People would begin to whisper quietly and the priests would bark at everyone at the top of their lungs – NO TALKING! THIS IS A SACRED PLACE! Then silence for a few seconds, a few of the hundreds of people in the Sistine Chapel would begin whispering once more, and thirty seconds later the priests would again bark at us – NO TALKING! DID YOU HEAR ME? NO TALKING! THIS IS A HOLY PLACE! RESPECT THE HOLINESS OF THIS CHAPEL! Honestly, the only people desecrating the holiness were the vicious, snarling priests acting like sadistic prison guards in some dystopian horror movie.

Another interesting thing were fragments of a moon rock. The crew of Apollo 11 brought back rocks from the moon and US President Richard Nixon sent little samples of them preserved in glass to every country in the world including the Vatican City. The last thing I visited was an ethnographic museum showing artefacts from indigenous cultures around the world; my country was represented with a large collection of dot paintings, woomeras, coolamons, boomerangs and Arnhem Land burial poles.

In the evening I went to a restaurant near my hotel. It was recommended in my Lonely Planet travel guide. I tend to avoid restaurants found in travel guides but I was sick of getting ripped off by scam artists posing as restaurateurs and I thought perhaps Lonely Planet would do a better job than I could at picking the genuine Italian places from the con jobs.

I thought correctly. Hostaria Dino e Toni is an old-fashioned trattoria in the neighbourhood of Prati and ought to be the greatest tourist attraction in all of Rome. The Colosseum? The Roman Forum? Pffft. They can’t even hold a candle to the greatness that is Hostaria Dino e Toni.

The place doesn’t look like it ought to be a great restaurant. Hostario Dino e Toni is a cramped little place with unassuming signage. The interior looks like it hasn’t changed much since the 1950s with battered green walls and chequered tablecloths. Yet the food was out of this world.

The two elderly proprietors, the eponymous Dino and Toni, constantly shuttled between the kitchen and the tables. There was no menu; whatever is being cooked on a given evening is what you get. Plate after plate of delicious food was placed on the table by the ever-smiling Dino and Toni. First, there was antipasto – salami, prosciutto, suppli, and spinach and ricotta pastry on a separate plate. This was followed by the first course, primo piatti – two pasta courses, really; rigatoni carbonara and rigatoni all’amatriciana in separate bowls; all washed down with a carafe of delectable house red wine and sparking mineral water. Dino suggested the second course, secondi piatti, various grilled meats and fish, but by this time I was more than full. I obliged by consenting to be served dessert, a nearly overflowing bowl of tiramisu.

Not only was the food divinely inspired but the atmosphere was fantastic. Dino and Tony were so friendly and happy and they made me feel like I was an honoured guest in their home. The courses were not only made with skill but made with love; love of food, love of life, love for their customers. It was rather expensive but I didn’t mind, it was worth every cent and then some.

While at Hostaria Dino e Tony all the bad things I had been thinking about Italy melted away. I had finally found the real Italy. And I learned a lesson: Italy is great. It’s just great in different ways to other countries.

Yes, Italy is disordered, dysfunctional, corrupt, barely belonging to the First World. But what life, what passion, what beauty. Thanks to Dino and Tony I no longer regretted coming here.

Ceiling fresco in the Vatican Museums

Egyptian mummy at the Vatican Museums

Statue of Ancient Greek statesman Pericles at the Vatican Museums

Adoration of the Magi at the Vatican Museums

Map of southern Italy in the Gallery of Maps at the Vatican Museums

Rome in the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums

San Marino in the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums

Moon rock samples at the Vatican Museums

Scale model of the entire country of Vatican City at the Vatican Museums

Payphone with Vatican City coat-of-arms at the Vatican Museums

Spinach and ricotta pastry at Hostaria Dino e Toni

Rigatoni carbonara at Hostaria Dino e Tony

Tiramisu at Hostaria Dino e Toni

When I was in Year 3 of primary school my class studied Pompeii. I was spellbound by the descriptions of the Mount Vesuvius volcano raining fire and ash on a city, burying the entire town and its unfortunate inhabitants beneath tens of metres of cinders, only to be unearthed perfectly preserved eighteen centuries later.

Learning about Pompeii at school awoke within me a lifelong fascination with volcanoes. I guess I have always been interested in things that I can’t see in Australia and Australia, occupying the most geologically stable continent on earth in the middle of a tectonic plate, doesn’t have active volcanoes.

I was determined to visit Pompeii one day. Thirty-three years later, I made it. Better late than never.

First, I had to get there. Pompeii is two hundred and forty kilometres southeast of Rome. In Australia, with its poor roads and slow, infrequent trains, this distance would most likely be outside day-tripping radius. Thankfully Italy is much better endowed with transport infrastructure.

Thus on the morning of Tuesday 12 November 2019 I emerged from the Empire Suites in the grim, damp dawn twilight, took the Line A metro to Roma Termini railway station and grabbed coffee and a pastry for breakfast at a station café near the platform entrance. Italian coffee culture is unusual from an Australian perspective. The coffee is excellent – Australians have learned well from their Italian maestros – but typically a customer will buy a coffee from the café, stand at the counter, wolf the coffee down in one gulp then go on their merry way. Judging by what I saw in Rome, coffee doesn’t seem to be quite the social thing as it is in Australia where the lingering mid-morning “coffee run” with colleagues and chatting up the cute barista have been elevated to a treasured ritual.

I showed my €36.50 Trenitalia ticket on my phone to the Trenitalia employee who let me through the gate and waited a short while for the sleek, long, red Frecciarossa high-speed train to arrive from Florence. Frecciarossa is Italian for “Red Arrow” and is the fastest of the three types of high-speed train operated by the government-owned Trenitalia.

After enduring another very Italian scrum of people trying to get on forcing their way against people trying to get off (God damn it, Italy!), I settled into my very comfortable window seat in a Standard class carriage and the train departed on time at 07:55. After a few kilometres of negotiating its way through the congested tracks around Roma Termini the Frecciarossa then found itself on the dedicated high-speed line southeast towards Naples.

The train rocketed across the fertile plains of Lazio and Campania at three hundred kilometres an hour, farms and villages little more than a blur. I experienced quite a bit of cognitive dissonance – how on earth does a nation as disorganised, corrupt and fractious as Italy manage to have such awesome railways? I asked my Italian colleague when I returned home, he told me that the Italian railways are secretly run by the Germans. I don’t think he was lying. It is the only explanation that could make any possible sense.

After about an hour the train entered Naples’ suburbs. My heart sank. I wasn’t in the First World any more. This was Dhaka or Lagos or Caracas or Manila. The dreary landscape was studded with grotty high-rise apartment buildings of the most appalling decrepitude. Every conceivable surface that could possibly be reached by human hands, and even many surfaces that couldn’t, was covered in the most vile graffiti. Some of the graffiti was in places that made me think the only way the vandals could get there was by helicopter. The slummy houses looked as if they were ready to collapse. The filthy narrow streets were congested with the most disorderly traffic. I thanked my lucky stars that my stay in Naples would only be brief.

The train arrived at Napoli Centrale station on time after its 220-kilometre journey from Rome that took only seventy minutes. I navigated through the buzzing station concourse trying to find the Circumvesuviana platforms, but of course all the signage was contradictory with a sign telling me to go one way right next to another sign telling me to go the other way. (God damn it, Italy!)

I found the Circumvesuviana platforms confusingly called Napoli Garibaldi station even though it is part of the Napoli Centrale station complex. I bought my magnetic-stripe ticket to Pompei Scavi-Villa dei Misteri station and walked down the stairs to the platforms. I had entered the very portal of hell itself. The station had all the charm of an underground car park, smelled like a public toilet and the trains, each and every one of them, were entirely covered in graffiti. A nasty old man who objected to me photographing the trains gave me the finger. Charming.

My Circumvesuviana train arrived after a twenty-minute wait and I boarded the noisy, rattly old thing. Circumvesuviana is a system of suburban rail lines serving the Naples metropolitan area running on a network of narrow-gauge tracks that are separate to the Trenitalia railway network; most lines run at thirty-minute intervals. As the name suggests, the lines form a ring around Mount Vesuvius.

The crowded train with cramped, uncomfortable plastic seats slowly emptied as it stopped at every station through Naples’ southeastern suburbs on the plains at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Thankfully the train soon arrived at Pompei Scavi-Villa dei Misteri and it was with considerable gratitude that I disembarked.

The entrance to the ruins of ancient Pompeii is right next to the station. I bought my entrance ticket, hired an audio guide and entered through the Porta Marina, the old city gate on the road to the old harbour which was nearby.

The next six hours saw me stumbling around one of the most magnificent places I have ever visited, my jaw scraping the two-thousand-year-old cobblestones as it dropped in amazement. I found myself involuntarily squealing with delight as I found yet another pristine mosaic or crisp mural or antique snack bar counter that looked like it was installed yesterday.

Pompeii is laid out like many Ancient Roman cities. There is a broad main street running roughly east-west, another prominent street running roughly north-south, and the two intersect at the Forum, a major square that was the commercial and governmental heart of the town. Running off the two main streets is a dense grid of narrower streets meeting at crisp right angles; the regularity of Pompeii’s grid meant I never got lost.

On the Forum with its pillared Basilica and temple to Jupiter is an open-sided shed with a display of artifacts unearthed by archaeologists. Among these finds are plaster casts. The bodies of humans and animals were buried by the ash and rock. The volcanic debris solidified around the corpses. The bodies slowly decomposed leaving a void in the compressed cinders in the shape of the body. Archaeologists pour plaster into these cavities as they find them and carefully chip away the volcanic matter to reveal a perfect impression of the dead person or animal. The most famous of these casts is the “Mule Driver”, crouched in agony, his hands feebly covering his face. Even more haunting is the cast of a child rigidly lying flat on its side with their arms clutched around their chest. There is also a dog lying on its back, its wide collar plainly visible, its four legs contorted as if trying to push the falling cinders away.

Just north of the old town outside the city walls is the Villa of Mysteries. This sprawling residence belonging to a patrician family has more courtyards, gardens, mosaics, saucy murals and servants’ quarters than I could care to count. It is much better preserved than most of the houses in town – the roof seems to have been spared collapse – and seems just as inhabitable now as it was back then.

I ambled around the streets in awe for far longer than I had anticipated. At regular intervals on the main streets were zebra crossings. Yes, the Roman Empire had zebra crossings. Ancient Roman kerbs were quite high – I would guess at least thirty centimetres if not higher – which made crossing the street quite dangerous. Never mind – the municipal authorities two thousand years ago installed stones shaped like zebra crossings, the tops of the stones flush with the height of the kerb; the gaps between the stones allowed carts to pass through the crossing unhindered. Genius.

There were houses for the rich with their mosaics and gardens and fountains, houses for the poor with their narrow frontages and small closet-like bedrooms. There was a brothel, its interior walls above the doors to the working rooms daubed with murals showing all the different positions customers could point at and order from the girls, rather like a McDonald’s menu. There were the thermopolia, snack bars with counters facing the street where hot food was served from pots recessed in the tiled counters. I could just imagine it – lentil stew, olives in red wine sauce, barley soup – drool! The Pompeii park authorities could do no better job than to bring these thermopolia back into service; the “restaurant” at Pompeii is expensive and disgusting. You would think I would learn by now to bring my own food when visiting tourist sites like this.

There was a bakery with its millstones and kneading benches and ovens, there were the public baths with its changing rooms and elaborate water heating systems, there was the macellum meat market with its stallholder booths facing onto the quadrangle. There was the amphitheatre where gladiators fought and Pink Floyd once performed, there was the theatre where Pompeiians were entertained, there was the palestra where athletes trained and competed, there were temples to this ancient god or that, there was a vineyard where a heirloom variety of grape is grown to make wine using the same methods as two millennia ago.

There is also so much yet to be discovered – only about two-thirds of the town has been excavated. The rest is still buried and will most likely remain so. Park authorities are fighting a never-ending battle against decay. The bits of Pompeii that have been unearthed are now exposed to the elements and are falling apart; many sites are closed to the public due to conservation works.

My plan for the day was to spend a couple of hours at Pompeii then somehow find my way to the top of Mount Vesuvius by bus or taxi, walk around the crater, then return to Naples in time for the train back to Rome. However, Pompeii was so interesting, so stimulating, so indescribably enthralling that I couldn’t leave. On every cobbled alley there was some sight that contrived to keep me lingering in Pompeii just a little bit longer.

The park closed around sunset at five o’clock. I left Pompeii grateful that I had been given the opportunity to see one of the greatest historic sites in the world, a snapshot of life as it was in a provincial town of one of the planet’s greatest empires of all time twenty centuries ago. My memories of Pompeii will be a source of delight the rest of my life.

I went back to Naples on yet another crummy, slightly nauseating Circumvesuviana train. I got to Napoli Centrale station at about six o’clock with ninety minutes to spare until my train back to Rome. I didn’t really feel like hanging around a railway station for ninety minutes so I got out my Lonely Planet, turned to the page with a map of the Naples city centre and started walking across the giant, windswept Piazza Garibaldi into the old town.

The route I chose was a rough triangle through the neighbourhood west of the station as far as the cathedral and back. I was slightly nervous – I had read too many horror stories about Naples, the thieves on Vespas who cut backpacks away from tourists with machetes at high speed, the giant piles of uncollected garbage, the rough quarters ruled by the Camorra organised crime families with an iron fist. I needn’t have worried too much.

Yes, I found myself in some of the filthiest, most disgusting neighbourhoods I have ever seen in the developed world. The grimy narrow streets were almost impassable due to the logjam of cars and motorbikes and scooters and delivery vans, the merchants whose wares encroached metres out the front of their shops, the disorderly crowds and the rancid bulging bags of rubbish.

But the diamonds I found in the Neapolitan rough! Laundry hung on lines strung between windows across the streets – just like in every movie I’ve ever seen set in Italy. It’s not just a stereotype! Six-year-old boys were kicking a football in the street completely unsupervised, their talents leaving me in no doubt that they will win the World Cup for the Azzurri in 2042. How many places are there in the Western world where kids can still kick ball in the street without anxious parents watching their every move? You can’t throw a brick without hitting a pizzeria in this city which is the birthplace of pizza. Everything you have heard about Neapolitan pizza being the greatest is true – and only two euros the slice, a rather large slice too. Carts sold freshly baked pastries of the most delectable sweetness for one euro each. A raven-haired lass of about twenty years and the most stunning beauty pulled up beside me on her Vespa. She shouted into the shop next to where I was walking. “Angela! Angela! Zia Angela!” Her black-smocked aunt came rushing out of the shop and they embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in a decade.

Naples is dismal, decaying, disorderly. But what life! What zest! The streets are abuzz with community, with family, with belonging, with passion. Who can truly say they have been alive if they have not yet been to Naples?

I wished that I had allotted myself more time to explore Naples – it seemed far more lively and authentically Italian than Rome and the energy of the place was nothing short of contagious. Unfortunately, time was fleeing and I needed to go and catch my train.

My Frecciarossa trip back to Roma Termini was just as efficient and uneventful as my morning southbound journey. Soon after getting off the train I had to go to the toilet. It was that dreaded time once again – I had to go to battle with that most repulsive of species, Bitchius maxmius, the common lesser spotted European toilet attendant.

I found the poorly-signed public toilet in some remote corner of the gargantuan station. Bitchius maximus was not at her little counter with the coin tray; she was just a couple of metres inside the entrance talking to some other customer. By this time I was rather desperate. “Buona sera? Hello? Umm … spiacente? Ho bisogno to go to the toilet … like, now? As in, right now? Hello? Ciao? Can you hear me?”

Bitchius maximus didn’t even respond. I waited as long as I could and called louder but she didn’t even blink. I needed to go. Desperate times call for desperate measures – I decided to go into the toilet and pay after I did my business. So I walked into the male toilet cubicle and locked the door.

World War III broke out. Bitchius maximus suddenly deigned to notice my presence. Fancy that! There was banging and kicking against the door and shouting and all sorts of cursing in rapid-fire Italian. I had no idea that such a small, demented old woman was capable of such furious strength.

I don’t understand European toilets. Every single one of them is staffed full-time by some hideous crone to whom you pay good money for the right to use yet every single one of them is disgraceful. The seat was missing. There was no soap. The hand dryer didn’t work. The toilet hadn’t been cleaned since Mussolini was Italy’s leader. I don’t know about you but if my full-time job were to oversee a public toilet the place would be so clean you’d be able to eat dinner off the floor. It’s not like the duties would be that complicated – collect cash from customers, clean and tidy up when things are quiet. Hardly the most taxing of jobs.

I took my sweet time just to make Bitchius maximus even more riled up then I finally emerged and with a smile on my face placed a one-euro coin in her stupid little tray. “I did try to get your attention, you stupid old cow, but you ignored me! I was going to pay, you mad f#$%ing bitch, no need to get your knickers in a knot. Go to hell, you miserable old w#$%e!” I shouted at her in English. I walked away and the lunatic was still shouting at me. I’m being honest – nothing makes me more proud to be Australian than our toilets. They are free, they are usually clean, they don’t have some psychopathic hag hanging around them making your life a misery. Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi oi oi!

The Mule Driver

Vineyard at Pompeii

Floor mosaic in the house of a wealthy Pompeii family

Theatre at Pompeii

Amphitheatre at Pompeii

Gladiator fight advertising in Latin in Pompeii

Pompeii Forum, the town's main square

Street in Pompeii

Animal mural in Pompeii house

Changing room at the Stabian Baths in Pompeii

Plaster cast of dog killed by eruption of Mt Vesuvius in Pompeii