For the next four weeks I’m going to be traveling through Italy and Greece on my honeymoon,1 occupying my days with the usual fun extravagance that couples do on their honeymoon, drinking many bottles of wine under yellow and white umbrellas on beaches hidden at the bottom of steep stone staircases zig-zagging down a nearly vertical cliff, swimming in the turquoise waters, eating bruschetta and eggplant parmesan and tiramisu and drinking as many aperol spritz’s as I can. I hope to write a few of these installments, along with other writings I’m working on, so these will be written quickly and without much revision.
My wife and I have already spent three days in Rome, toured through the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon, and the other usual landmarks that you are meant to see when traveling to Rome for the first time. We went to the island of Ischia, one of the myriad postcard islands off the coast of Naples, riding around the small island on a rented Vespa, going from one feeding to the next.2 I’m reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying right now, which I wish I did not bring on this trip. Faulkner is one of the best of course, but having to crawl through the forlorn journey of a family of unhappy and ugly hicks from the south is not what you are meant to fill your head with while traveling through the land of romance. I don’t really know what Italian writers I’m supposed to be reading. Machiavelli? Umberto Eco? Dante? Someone illuminate me, please. There is the obvious romance you want here, the kind that you want to come naturally, not overly curated and self-aware—you don’t want a Pinocchio themed bar to serve you spaghetti and meatballs, but you want a gentler authentic experience. Just the right kind of authentic, away from the souvenir shops and weirdly shaped other American tourists guffawing about why is there no macaroni and cheese for their toddler.
Americans go to Europe because there is actually a history here. You can see it everywhere you go. I’m from Los Angeles, so our history is some of the most lackluster in the world—we have Hollywood history, stories of Mulholland and the water wars, the orange groves that used to populate the great valleys. On school trips we don’t get to visit the Roman Forum that was built around 500 BCE, and expanded by the great emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. We don’t have anything even remotely as grand as St Peter’s Basilica. We got to visit a few Spanish missions, dusty enclaves of disease, scars of pointless abuse. We have those mandatory acknowledgements during the initial greeting every time you see a play that reminds us we are occupying Native American land and that we’re all criminals. The east coast for us is history, a reminder that we are part of a moving timescale, and not just a static block of vanity. But Europe for us is where we go to be a part of some memory of ourselves, to think of how good and lazy we have it now, to see the scale of wars we’ve never even heard of before, the fortresses built by slaves for kings. The cathedrals and churches boast extravagant scales of design and attention, ornate frescoed bell towers of hundred and fifty foot tall churches with twenty foot thick walls that took over a hundred years to build. These are everywhere. Even simple apartment buildings are often built with the kind of craftsmanship you’re not used to seeing anywhere in the New World.
Voltaire said “The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” In a sense, he was right. It was the Vatican that was holy ground, the center of the church. And it was the Pope who was chosen by God, and the Pope who elected the emperor. God had no direct connection to the empire or the emperor itself. The Roman Empire wasn’t even entirely Catholic, but included a smatter of Protestant sects that were often at odds with one another. It was more a collection of kingdoms that had an array of linguistic differences.
History is of course just a matter of how far back you want to go back in time. Usually when some production of the history of the Earth is made, they do some form of “the history of the cosmos in fifteen minutes or less” to catch you up to speed. And then you fast forward through the gesticulating turds of microbes coalescing into sentient biped form. And history is usually just knowing things in order to tell people. Even if you were trying to animate them for yourself, it is difficult to go deeper than the surface of an intellectual effort. I’ve traveled a lot and seen a lot of ruins and remains of ancient civilizations, but so far this trip has illuminated a unique realness to the history around us, like it were some kind of metaphysical Beyond that’s breathing through us, that the wars and slaves and despairs were real, and not just good fodder for another television series to binge during another excruciating hangover. I wish I knew for more history. I wish I could visually make sense of the sprawling confluence of wars and civilizations and dictators and political movements and ideologies. And it’s all so big and overwhelming.
First, we went to the Colosseum. Before the Colosseum, there was marshy grassland, a canal that ran through it, eventually an artificial lake. After the Great Fire of Rome of 64 AD, where the famous line of Nero playing the fiddle became the only thing that people know about him, and that too is fictionalized. He quickly acquired the land in order to add to his own personal wealth and palace. He built a massive swimming pool the size of a small lake, ornate pavilions and gardens, opulent garnishes of life that made it more comfortable to live with everyone else, and to die with them all the same. But once he was killed, all evidence of him was destroyed, and all that remains of Nero is contempt and his humiliation. The lake was filled in, his Domus Aurea destroyed, and the emperor Vespasian chose the Colosseum—or Flavium Amphitheater—to be built for the people, a populist offering, seducing the people with political propaganda, giving them a place to come to for free, to satiate them in an amphitheater of death and entertainment.
Because every detail of the Colosseum was for and of this use. Entertain the piglet people with death, a completely savage brutishness, drilled into our skulls that inventive ways of killing each other is what living is all about. Acquiring all the material of course was no peaceful matter. The Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE was led by Vespasian’s son and future emperor Titus, who conquered the city and destroyed the Second Jewish Temple, which as the name implies replaced the first Jewish Temple, Solomon’s Temple, which was also destroyed during the Babylonian Siege in 587 BCE. And Jewish slaves were then marched back, carrying the loads of material that was then used to build the Colosseum, a true We’re-going-to-build-the-wall-and-make-Mexico-pay-for-it type of scenario. With Jerusalem under Roman control, 60,000 slaves were taken, carrying not just the marble and limestone and tiles and cement to build the Colosseum with, but also 200,000 kilos of gold, a procession that would take eight hours to pass you. It took less than a decade to build, an incredible feat judging by the size and scale of the arena, with the inaugural gladiator games being held around 80 CE. It could hold around 70,000 people, was free for all citizens. Some emperors preferred the games, committing more than eight months straight of games. Others, like Marcus Aurelius, were seemingly indifferent. He would read books as the slaughter carried on in front of him.
“Arena” means sand in Latin. It was an empty canvas on which new landscapes were created. Palm trees and large boulders were elevated into place, and then wild megafauna ascended up elevator ramps from underground, each elevator operated by eight slaves. Much of the crowd had never seen or heard of most of these animals before. Starved tigers and elephants and cheetahs and rhinos and giraffes would face each other and forced to fight to the death, and the Roman commoners would gamble on their favorite ones, drunk on wine and free bread, hooting in their imbecilic infancy. Gladiators would of course fight one another, but they would also carry out hunts, pretending to be in some exotic natural landscape where these animals were at home. But not just the gladiators would fight. Prisoners too. They came here for their death sentence, sometimes set on fire and forced to run around in what was known as the Spartan dance. It’s estimated somewhere around 400,000 people died in these ritualistic public spectacles at the Colosseum, in the 350 years or so while the games were in session. Voltaire said “The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.” And it’s amazing what we’re able to achieve, what we’re able to build, but all of it is to numb to terror and mutiny of being alive.
Just a year before the inaugural games at the Colosseum, in 79 CE, was the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, burying Pompeii, Herculaneum, Optolnis, and several other Roman settlements in seven meters of molten ash. It created a twenty mile high mushroom cloud that spewed out 200,000 tons of ash per second. We toured Pompeii, which is just several miles outside of Naples, and while it’s a couple kilometers from the ocean, there are mooring rings fastened to pillars along the outside walls, where boats used to fasten onto. Pompeii was a seaside settlement. The eruption itself added two kilometers of land, now grown over with roads and souvenir shops, tourists shuffling from side to side with their neon visors, sweating profusely through the history lesson of their dreams.
Pompeii was one of the most impressive ancient sites I’ve ever seen. In school, I had only heard about a few of the petrified corpses embracing each other, I maybe heard about someone running away and frozen in time forever. I’ve seen Pink Floyd’s “Live in Pompeii” several times, but for whatever reason never fully acknowledged that they were playing in a huge gladiator arena once buried in a pyroclastic flow from two thousand years ago. Ruins are just seen as crumbling unfinished walls, weeds growing through ground, clunky rooms that presumably housed people without names or identities or self-conscious lives. It’s always so difficult to really visualize what life must have been like when you visit a famous archeological site. There are never roofs, it’s always hot, you’re always hungry, always distracted by how miserable everyone looks, how everyone else in your tour looks like they completely gave up, and are just phoning it in for the rest of their lives. Pompeii felt different. The scale of the city was unbelievable. Tens of thousands of people lived here, in a city, by every measure, was cosmopolitan and modern. Sprawling frescoes of the most ornate and panoramic and descriptive scenes with the most vivid well-preserved colors, some walls of which looked almost new and unblemished. There’s a tiled mosaic made with over two million tiles making a scene of Alexander the Great defeating the Persian army, resplendent with wailing horses, armies in battle, even the portraits of dying men in the reflections of their shields. There’s a floor mosaic at the entryway of a residence with an image of a dog with a collar and leash, and the words Cave Canem—Beware of Dog—written under it. There’s a brothel, and a changing room for the brothel, where you look up and see myriad different sexual positions you might want to try. There are cocks everywhere in the city. Cocks as sign posts, literally pointing the direction like arrows to the brothel. There’s a sculpture of Pan fucking a goat in the Naples Museum. There’s bronze wind chimes with a phallus shaped like a winged lion. The phalluses were some sign of fertility and good luck, but they clearly treated the erotic with more liberty and the casual perversion as fun. We are the prude moralists in comparison today, cowards of the body shuttered in our cloaks of stuffy shame. In 1819, when King Francis I of Naples visited the museum, upon seeing the stone phallus reliefs, the massive cocks of mythic gods in paintings, he shuttered the doors of these exhibits, locking them behind doors for nearly a hundred years.
But history changes us, sometimes by necessity and hardship, by the calamity of so many pig people pushing against one another, sometimes just by the dull passage of time. There is something meaningful in this moment of time we are in, I’m sure of it. Surely we are not all just tourists, spending our savings, drowning our feelings into siestas of bruschetta and aperol spritz’s, tanning with the large wrinkly beach men in their speedos. Surely there is some metaphysical Beyond of sensible progression, some fresco or mosaic of vague collective meaning, some thing we are part of, even if it’s just being the finely crafted cogs in a self-improving machine. Surely we are not all just tourists.
People are so precious with their recommendations when traveling abroad. You ask someone who’s been to Greece before what islands you should go to you, and they’ll lean in and talk straight at you like they’re letting you in on a bit of gossip. They are telling you where to go. They’ve already been there, done that, surely off to better places already, so you can go now as representatives of them. These are their suggestions, the islands are practically their islands, but don’t tell anyone else because you don’t want to blow it up, because you know, once the masses hear about it, it’s all over for the few quaint places left in the world.
I used to travel more with friends, for the sole purpose of surfing. And while I’m not necessarily a surfing fanatic, traveling with a structure and centered purpose can give it some meaning, however hedonistic it may be. It’s usually been a challenge to enjoy vacations, because they are usually just trying to find ways to spend your time between feedings, like cows chewing their way through time.