A good night of sleep! Hooray! The boys seem to be getting accustomed to the time change, which is a relief. I honestly didn’t know how long this would take, but I was prepared for the worst. And, since we have been walking so much, for the first time in their lives, I’ve been waking them up rather than the other way around. Any bets on how long that will last?
Once we rolled out of bed, and had an espresso and some breakfast, we got ready to catch a bus down to the Via Appia (Appian Way) to the Catacombs San Callisto. So far our experience getting on the bus has been interesting to say the least. Usually, it has consisted of me looking up where we want to go in Google Maps, finding multiple bus route options, and then us sprinting to various stops only to see the bus we need driving away as we approach. Finally, we pick a stop to stand at and then grumble for 15 minutes or so while our boys probably wonder how their parents lost their minds. Then the bus arrives.
Once on the bus, they are very efficient and get us quickly where we need to go, however, there isn’t any indication of what the next stop is. Somehow, it seems like everyone else has some sort of homing pigeon sense of where they are because they will casually press the stop button and get off when they need to. Then there’s me, looking like a lunatic, hunching over at each stop to see the name of it out the window so I can count how many we have left.
The bus ride down to the catacombs was nice and took us outside of the city center for the first time. We passed through the Aurelian Walls and onto the Via Appia. It is one of the first paved roads built by the Romans to move military supplies and is also famous for being the road along which Sparticus’ army was crucified after their failed revolt. There are walls on each side and the road is narrow, without sidewalks. When we got off the bus, it was like the feeling in that scene from Indiana Jones where the big boulder is rolling after him and he had to find a gap in the wall to dodge it, except in this case the boulders were cars, hurtling toward us down this narrow walled, ancient road. Thankfully we found our gap in the wall and it opened us up onto beautiful countryside with rolling hills and towering pines.
We purchased tickets and began our tour of the catacombs. The particular set we went to were started in the 3rd century as a place to bury Christians instead of in pagan cemeteries. Numerous Popes and early Christian martyrs were buried in there and while we only toured a small portion, they apparently stretch for for like 20 km and at one point around half a million Christians were buried there.
Going down into them was a surreal experience. The hallways are narrow but tall, stretching up two or three stories, and the walls are lined with sepulchers, the small slots carved into the walls of rock where remains of the dead were laid. The air was cool and dry as we meandered through the dark galleries of graves looking at early Christian symbols carved into the rock and admiring frescoes of the last supper and the good shepherd adorning the graves. At each turn, there were paths, not part of the tour, that you could look down gazing at the sepulcher lined walls fading away into the darkness. My favorite part, however, was after our tour guide finished a particular stop on the tour and as everyone stood in silence taking in the scene, Silas yelled, “Yay! He’s done talking!” That’s my boy.
Once again, as I spoke about in my last post, being present in such a hallowed place stirred the emotions. Many of the people once buried there lived in a time and place where Christianity was not accepted and many of them paid the ultimate price for their faith. I am fortunate to not live as a Christian under those circumstances.
One thing our guide mentioned that stuck with me was after the dead were laid to rest in the catacombs, their families would still descend to visit their remains while they mourned, and they would bring bread and wine to take communion. They did this in light of John 11:25-26 where Jesus describes himself, after raising Lazarus from the dead, as the resurrection and the life. He is the one who connects the living to the dead, the dead to the living, and brings the dead back to life. By taking the symbolic body of Christ in bread and the blood of Christ in wine, it was the closest connection they could make while still living, with their passed loved one now living in new life.
After we reemerged from the catacombs we walked for a little ways down a path along some olive trees and went in a church that happened to have another random Bernini statue in it (apparently his final one). Then we looked up the nearest bus stop that was a moderate walk away. Once again, I unknowingly chose a path down a busy road with no sidewalks, no shoulder, and with walls and/or brush lining either side. We made it to the bus stop in time for the next bus, but only after some panicked walking, yelling, and Silas getting bushwhacked multiple times in the eye and face.
Once we made it back, I went to work and the boys went down for a long nap. Today was the first day I had to make the context switch from vacation to work and, thankfully, it went pretty smoothly. A double shot of espresso can do wonders. The boys and Allison went to the playground and I was able to meet up with them to go grab pizza from the corner spot for my dinner break.
We planned this trip to Italy as an adventure. So far it has lived up to that expectation in some challenging ways and in many many good ways. To keep the adventure theme going, we realized this evening it is supposed to rain in Rome all weekend. We knew this was a possibility, even an inevitability, at some point, but with most of the activities being outside, we were still concerned with what to do. So we looked for places it won’t be raining and, in the name of adventure, we booked train tickets and an AirBnB for the weekend in Manarola, a small coastal town part of the area referred to as Cinque Terre along the Italian Riviera. Our train leaves tomorrow at noon!