I think it was Joe who first mentioned that I had missed seeing Galileo’s middle finger when I was in Florence on vacation last summer. I’m still kind of bummed about that. Here’s a summary of the digit that I recently discovered at Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, which condensed the tale from Curious Expeditions:

It is a remarkable bit of irony, that finger. Venerated, kept in reliquary, subjected to the same treatment as a Saint. But this finger belonged to no Saint. It is the long bony finger of an enemy of the church, a heretic. A man so dangerous to the religious institution he was made a prisoner in his own home. It sits in a small glass egg atop an inscribed marble base in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, or the History of Science Museum in Florence, Italy. ... As with a fine wine, it took some years for Galileo’s finger to age into something worth snapping off his skeletal hand. The finger was removed by one Anton Francesco Gori on March 12, 1737, 95 years after Galileo’s death. Passed around for a couple hundred years it finally came to rest in the Florence History of Science Museum. Today is sits among lodestones and telescopes, the only human fragment in a museum devoted entirely to scientific instruments. It is hard to know how Galileo would have felt about the final resting place of his finger. Whether the finger points upwards to the sky, where Galileo glimpsed the glory of the universe and saw God in mathematics, or if it sits eternally defiant to the church that condemned him, is for the viewer to decide.

There’s a great Roman innovation that doesn’t get as much play as the aqueducts and sewer systems: satire.

A fine article (“My Satirical Self”) in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine by Wyatt Mason, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, notes that satire began with Gaius Lucilius in the second century B.C., who lampooned all things Greek, a culture he felt his fellow citizens were imitating too closely.

“A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.”

Juvenal, another Roman, writes, “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . . Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.”

My first thought was that these photos from our Italian vacation would be perfect for Dana’s and my celebrity READ posters, except that I believe we’re both pretending to read picture books.

The settings are two unassailably cool Italian bookstores. The one I’m in is an expat operation featuring all English books, many of which are used. The one Dana’s in sells bound scripts, actor bios and other film books, plus an awesome selection of original movie posters from the ’60s and ’70s. (Check out the Italian Godfather poster on the right-hand side of Dana’s photo!)

In which Jason is reclaimed by the mothership.

In a related note, via today’s mail I received a CD full of Dana’s digital photos from our recent Roman holiday.

As you may know, I prefer unposed snapshots, although I recognize they’re no less deceiving than posed shots in depicting reality. Or as New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in 1997, “all photographs are contrived to the degree that the photographer chooses the image, framing what is to be in and out of it.”

For instance, this photo of Dana at the window of our hotel room in Rome is sorta quaint—the light and shadow, the Old World shutters and the new world glass window, the architecture of the building across the way and the Vermeer turn of her head—but the actual action depicted is her mild annoyance at me for photographing her as she clipped her fingernails. I think she may have been trying to hit the loud accordionist on the street below.

And now your perception of a photo has been altered to something you were probably better off not knowing.

After our 6 a.m. wakeup call and the last of our daily cappuccinos and cornettos, croissant-like rolls that are the nearest the Romans have to a universal breakfast food, Dana and I got bussed out to the airport. We had annoying Irish kids on our flight; the girl next to Dana put a handful of Maltesers in an empty Pringles can and shook it until her Dad told her not to, whereupon she laughed at him, he did nothing and she resumed shaking. Across the aisle, the ADD-racked boy sitting next to me kept quoting a line he claimed was from The Simpsons but which I’d never heard (and now can’t recall) while he opened and shut the windowshade until I wanted to reach over his ineffectual mother and punch him in the neck.

Back in Ireland, we were greeted by a downpour, then gorgeous sunny skies only minutes later, in the grand mercurial fashion of the country. I got a pint of Guinness with Dana at her house’s favored pub, Granger’s, shortly after which I shipped back out to the airport for my six-hour-plus return flight to JFK.

My gift from Aer Lingus was a half-full plane upon which I could stretch out and sleep. I discovered that I require the width of three seats for this purpose; or, expressed as an algebraic equation, 3s=J. There was a jackass family on this flight, too, with three kids that kept running around as if their brains were being bombarded by prions, while their father, a large tattooed meatsack whose neck was the diameter of my waist, shouted unheeded advice from his seat in a gravy-thick New York accent.

The travel may have been rough, but the vacation itself was, as they say, molto bene.

I haven’t mentioned much about the places we’ve eaten because they’ve been mostly good and mostly all pasta. We did discover that food lovers must steer clear of Rome in August: many recommended restaurants are closed for the whole month while the owners and staff vacation, presumably in America. Here are some other tips:

• Order the house wine. It’s cheap and good. Everyone says this and it’s true.
• Sit outside for better people-watching.
• To tip for a dinner, round up the bill to the nearest dollar amount or chip in 10%. Aggravatingly, Romans aren’t expected to tip but tourists are.
• Finally, beware
  • menus with photos of entrees
  • waiters who attempt to corral you in from the street
  • restaurant names in blatant English (one I saw was called “That’s Amore!”)
  • restaurants with red-and-white checkered tablecloths

Not all Americans abroad speak loudly, but whenever an abrasively amped voice here turned heads, it was attached to a cornfed blowhole: the woman in the gelateria under the impression that speaking louder and slower made her English comprehensible to the Italian-speaking clerk; the woman in the hall recounting her life story to some poor soul at 4 a.m., heard clearly through our hotel room’s door; the bratty teen on the street who whined to her parents, “I want shoes. Shoes, shoes, shoes!”; the trattoria patron trumpeting, “Excuse me! Sir? Excuse me! Can I get some ice for my Coke?”; and the usual couples arguing over directions, which start out using the word “hon” in a patronizing fashion, followed shortly by shouting.

But while anyone can hear an American, I found it tough to distinguish them on looks alone. At the Uffizi in particular, I entertained myself with a guessing game based on clothing, hair, eyewear, even posture, then sidled near to see if I could overhear what language they may have been speaking. Unfortunately, I heard little because the Uffizi attracts reverent patrons (although that could just be doggedness from the long wait in line). Most of the time, though not always, I found the stereotypes hold true: Americans like clothing with logos, ballcaps and bad shoes.

After a brisk tour of Villa Borghese, Rome’s second-largest public park, we hit the streets for a touch of shopping. We discovered gray-painted antique wooden stalls in a lot, manned by friendly vendors selling old and antique books, prints and postcards at reasonable prices. It was exactly what I thought the Porta Portese flea market would be and I wish I would have written in my notes where these vendors were located.

If you are a lady in search of funky-fresh stylings from yesterday and today, you must hit Via del Governo Vecchio near the Piazza Navona. Mixed in with pricey antique dealers are snug little joints that smell pleasantly of thriftshop must, stale cigarette smoke and bargains. Dana snagged a retro black skirt in a flower print at a place called Cinzia Vestiti Usati, which boasted old records, eyeglasses and shades, boots, leather jackets and other stuff. Dana located but passed on a pair of billowly purple silk pants that I imagine Carly Simon donated in the late ‘70s.

Dana and I can tell we’ve neared the end now that we’re scraping the guidebook for stuff yet to do in Rome. Also I have the makings of a cold, with a scratchy throat and a snot-filled skull that makes my head feel as heavy as it looks. I won’t speak of this pending illness again because it makes me sad and angry to get sick on vacation.

Bless Lonely Planet and its well-written guidebooks. But trust no one guide fully. Lonely Planet’s 2006 Rome City Guide recommends the Porta Portese flea market in Travastevere, hinted as a charming Sunday-morning diversion. Don’t go. It’s a gauntlet of cheap Asianmade clothing, wallets, jewelry and bric-a-brac shilled by shitmongers worldwide, plus the addition of Roman hillbillies hawking bootleg DVDs, watches and cigarettes. All this stuff I could buy on Eighth Avenue in New York’s Garment District. And the buyers at the market are the Roman equivalent of trailer trash, swarming around the weary tourists such as ourselves who also likely wanted to have a word with Lonely Planet author Duncan Greenwood.

Later in the day, we purchased audio self-tours at the Pasta Museum because we though the place sounded funny, but it was overpriced and the placards were in Italian. I did learn the sentence Se la farnia è argento la semola è oro. (If flour is silver, semolina is gold.), that Italians have eaten dry pasta since 1154 and that the starchy staple is available in more than 300 shapes. I didn’t learn, however, why Italians started eating pasta and why they haven’t stopped. I mean I know it tastes good and all, but I suspect there are factors at work here that the museum was too loath or lazy to cover.

Our day closed with what we thought would be a high point but was another letdown, Il Gelato di San Crispino, or in English, Rome’s most lauded ice cream shop, endorsed stateside by hipster director Wes Anderson and The New York Times, whose ass-tonguing review is laminated and posted outside.

Maybe we got bum batches, but not only was it the most expensive gelato we ate (and we ate it at least once daily), it was the blandest. My bourbon-vanilla tasted of neither. Dana’s honey flavor tasted of nothingness. It was soylent gelato. But the badness didn’t stop there. The countergirl, clad in an eye-searingly white paper hat and crisp cloth smock, seemed to delight in leveling off the cups and cones instead of piling it on the way everyone else does. And you can’t view your gelato pre-purchase there; it’s closed in clinical, stainless steel pots with little holes where the scoop handles poke out. All you have to go on is a sad little placard printed with the flavor.

Most gelato is merchandised under a glass-fronted counter/freezer cabinet in what appear to be stainless steel steam-trays, each the dimensions of a very large meatloaf pan. The gelato is heaped in there, labeled and optionally topped with related décor. If it’s pineapple flavor, for instance, there may be a spiky pineapple top planted in there. Tiramisu flavor is sculpted and layered to resemble the dessert. At one place, there was a whole mango halfheartedly plunked atop the mango gelato. “Better something than nothing,” seemed to be the cheery philosophy there.

This visual styling is a blast but the real reason you want your gelato on view is to gauge its consistency. We skipped several outfits where the wares looked melty or resembled cottage cheese. In its proper consistency, gelato has a tough-to-describe texture different from American ice cream. It’s almost tacky in texture, but still creamy, yet not as filling as the U.S. stuff: strangely tasty. My favorite flavor was pistachio, which at one place included bits of real pistachio nuts.

Most valuable gelato tip: layering multiple flavors is not only allowed, it’s often encouraged. Mix it up for maximum tastiness!

Today at the Piramide station¹ on the Metro B line, I spotted a vending machine, except instead of containing gumballs or friendship bracelets, it was stocked with ladies’ underdrawers for sale, wadded into small snap-top plastic bubbles. “At least they seemed to be clean, new underdrawers,” I thought.

Vendable unmentionables isn’t as perverted or unusual as it may first seem. As we discovered, underwear is a major feature of Roman retail. In certain segments of the city, especially the high-rent one in which our hotel is located, there’s an underwear boutique on every block, several with slowly rotating underwear-clad mannequins of the human torso positioned in the front window, so you can check out that thong front and back.

There may be an association between ubiquitous lingerie and the fact that you see couples in Rome, presumably Italians, making out all over the place: in cars, against walls, at the supermarket, on the Metro, just standing there in the piazza, etc. I would not be shocked to learn that making out is listed as a top hobby of Romans, along with buying underpants and not neutering their dogs, which you also really can’t help but notice.

Rome’s a city in love with with its history, culture and self, and that love rubs off on its citizens. I got the uncomfortable impression several waiters and most of the assholes on the street peddling long-stem red roses thought Dana and I were married. One insisted on taking a photo of us together at dinner. Another said I was “a lucky guy,” which I am, but not how he meant, I think.

¹ So named because when you exit the station, right across the street is the famous Pyramid of Caius Cestius. Yeah, I never heard of it either. [back]

Dana and I took a Eurostar train from Rome’s Termini station up to Florence for a day, where the highlight was Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia Gallery, a shoddy place with the poor lighting and fake red brick floor of a shopping mall food court circa 1985.

It’s fortunate the statue was moved indoors in 1873 because you can see the apparent effects traditional weather and/or modern phenomena like acid rain have had on Italy’s buildings, monuments and sculpture. I noticed this in particular yesterday at the steps of St. Peter’s Piazza, which are scarred with tiny blackened pits of decay that collect rainwater.

If you’ve only seen David in a print, the statue is much larger than you think: 17 feet tall¹. His hands and feet, detailed with intricately realistic veins, seem exaggerated. But maybe this is appropriate for a giantslayer strong, surefooted and clad in nothing but his wits and a slingshot. His stature and gaze are simultaneously stoic and youthfully relaxed, shy even. You’re allowed to snicker at his dick, resplendent with abstract whorls of pubic hair, but NO PHOTO, as the plainclothes guards shouted. Dana tried to do so anyway, but a clear-eared guard heard the slow and sneaky rip of Velcro on her camera case, chastised her and glowered at us until we left.

Later we advanced slowly in line for the Uffizi Gallery while watching cretins jump queue and shitmongers shill art posters that they scooped off the cobblestones and hid every time a blue-uniformed poliziotto sauntered by. Once inside, I enjoyed German Renaissance man Lucas Cranach the Elder‘s diptych of Adam and Eve from 1528, but mostly Eve, who I think looks hot. (Is that wrong?) Also hot is the obvious standout of the Uffizi, which I didn’t even know was there until we saw it, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Venus bewitches, but so do the tumbling, entwined zephyrs personified on the left, blowing her ashore in a frisson of flowers.

I can tell you that if portraits of Madonna col bambino quicken your pulse, then the Uffizi—really probably any museum in Italy—is for you. It’s clear Italians are reverent superfans of Mary & Jesus, but all those paintings of mothers and children ran together in my mind until I started skipping them altogether.

¹ Photos of canonical artworks like this (and the Mona Lisa, The Persistence of Memory, Rodin’s The Thinker, et al) are nearly always cropped tightly. Or they’re cropped loosely but without people or other scale-establishing elements. Travel guides love the latter because they imply romantic exclusivity. That is, you the tourist-viewer can walk right up to these famous works and bask in their beauty and have them all to yourself and your goosebumps. In reality, you will discover the museum has a heart-stoppingly long queue of guidebook-purchasing yahoos like yourself and the gallery is as packed as a Japanese subway car at rush hour. But the true determent of reproductions is that is no one realizes the scope of the actual artwork. This explains why, if you eavesdrop on people clumped around, say, The Persistence of Memory at the Museum of Modern Art, the #1 topic of conversation is disappointment or incredulousness over how small the thing is. Refreshingly, David is at least three times larger than most everyone imagines, plus buck naked, so everyone wins. [back]

All roads lead to Rome, they say. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that Roman traffic is comprised of gnatlike swarms of motorcycles and scooters, although not as many Vespas as I’d have thought. At rush hour, you see men in handsomely trim suits and women in dresses and heels incongruously wearing helmets as they motor to or from work.

For drivers favoring four wheels, a roof, and not much else, Smart cars are all the rage. As small and cubelike as a two-seater can get, they take up as much space parked parallel or perpendicular to the curb. With customized trim and upholstery jobs, and as curved, shiny and vividly colored as fingernails freshly manicured and polished, I would not be surprised to learn Smart cars were actually manufactured by Apple.

At least the Romans know where they’re going. For tourists, especially now during vacation season, the way is crowded and confusing. Streets end abruptly and turn into different streets while others seem to have more than one name at the same point. For the orderly and appreciative of city plans resembling grids, Rome maddens. Everything curves. Maps resemble a pile of spaghetti. At most every corner and intersection, visitors consult a map or guidebook and squint up at the sides of the buildings. There on the walls, the names of Rome’s tortuous vias are chiseled, headstones marking the death of carefully plotted directions.

Based on horror stories I’d accumulated from Rome-ing friends and coworkers, I feared pickpockets and ne’er-do-wells. I spent an inordinate amount of time shielding Dana’s bag from potential Vespa-borne snatchers. But the only busy hands we witnessed directly were outside the high walls of Vatican City where a tagteam of gypsies bum-rushed the American behind us in line; he stayed with the caller on his cellphone and said, “Hold on a sec; someone’s trying to steal my wallet.” Dana and I theorize we were spared such malfeasance in general because in certain light and stagings, we can appear vaguely non-American, as long as we keep our yaps shut and steer clear of McDonald’s. I think it’s the black plastic spectacle frames and our proclivity for “interesting” clothing.

The Vatican Museums comprise nearly a dozen interconnected small galleries or mini-museums, at the end of which is the Sistine Chapel, which, let’s face it, is the reason everyone’s there. Most of the comparatively minor stuff leading up to that iconic fresco gets the short shrift. As we hustled through with the other cattle, I was surprised to spot in the modern art gallery a few of Dali’s religious themed paintings, and especially one of Francis Bacon‘s more sedate papal portraits, still a strange pick for hardline Catholics. The artist usually painted a pontiff trapped in a transparent cube, head exploding in a gape-mouthed vertical smear. A scathing 1974 article in Time of the Vatican’s modern art holdings contained this well-put Bacon bit:

The only distinguished image of a Pope in the collection is one of Francis Bacon’s variations on Velásquez’s Innocent X. The gift of Italian Automobile Tycoon Gianni Agnelli, it sits, mouth open in a feral and silent snarl, glaring at the sacramental kitsch around it. But that it should be hung as "religious" art is unconscious black humor.

The Sistine Chapel is essentially a dim, high rectangular room packed with people shoulder-to-shoulder milling around like it’s the world’s quietest, slowest rave. From their vantage point on the steps leading up to the altar, guards shout NO PHOTO whenever they see a camera or a flash. Alternately, they shout SHHHH, which sounds impossible, but judging by the noisiness of the crowd, it’s something they’ve had lots of practice at. These interjections quash any epiphanies or grandeur you may plan to experience viewing Michelangelo’s masterpiece. You’ll be standing there, reverently contemplating God bringing life through the limp hand of Adam when suddenly SHHHH! NO PHOTO!! SHHHHHHH!

In the Vatican Museums cafeteria, we composed and mailed postcards to family. While waiting in line for lunch, Dana noticed the holy city peddles wine packaged in what appear to be children’s Tetra Pak juice boxes.

Back outside, we walked over to nearby St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s big. Really big. It holds 60,000 people and there’s likely enough airspace inside to fly around in one of those lightweight airplanes without knocking into anything. The Pietà, an eerie marble lump of disproportion, sits near the front doors in an alcove behind a floor-to-ceiling sheet of plastic to prevent further lunatic hammer attacks.

In the basement, nearly 100 popes are entombed. Everyone tried to cluster around Pope John Paul II‘s tomb, a simple white marble affair located not far from the site of St. Peter‘s alleged remains. A bouncer-like guard only gave everyone about 15 seconds facetime with the sarcophagus before shooing them on down the line.

Outside in the square, the clownishly clad Swiss Guard stand stoically with their lances as tourists photograph them from a distance. If they can help it, the only part of them that moves is their beady eyes.

The architectural highlight of Rome for me was the Pantheon. Like much here, that thing is old; it’s not even the original Pantheon and it was built circa 125. But what blows my mind, particularly as Dana and I stood inside, directly in the center, and looked up, is that modern structural engineers can’t fully explain how the fuck the temple’s 5,000-ton dome stands up. If you were to hire a team of burly men from New Jersey to recreate it using modern building materials, it would collapse under its own weight.

Eggheads theorize the Romans used different grades of concrete, starting with the dense and heavy stuff at the dome’s base, graduating up to lighter composites, then topping it off with a pumicelike substance. (It’s beyond me why someone can’t just X-ray the thing or something to find out definitively.) There’s also a hole centered in the top of the dome, which helps disperse weight and in a perfect balance of form and function, lets in light majestically. It also, of course, lets in rain, but the Romans covered that by secreting several drains in the marble floor below.

We toured the Pantheon early this morning, which was a fine idea, because there was no one there except a few early risers and a wandering elderly priest cassocked in white, probably assigned to provide a colorful local human element for tourists’ snapshots.

Raphael, who died in 1520, was buried at the Pantheon on request and his epitaph is the most conceited I’ve yet read; I love it.

Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens et moriente mori.

Here lies Raphael. When he was alive, Nature was afraid to be bested by him. When he died, she wanted to die herself.

Later in the day, wandering around near the Tiber River, we happened upon the Mouth of Truth. Dana gave it a try and managed to retain her hand. It’s strange that a manhole cover could become a talisman and tourist attraction, but I’m sure the Audrey Hepburn association doesn’t hurt.

We had trouble locating Domus Aurea, a.k.a. Nero’s house, but found it closed for renovation, a curious status for a ruin. We scaled the lunkish Castel Sant’Angelo, a onetime fortress near Vatican City. Via a secret tunnel, the pope could flee to the stronghold if the Vatican came under siege.

We dined on the Piazza Pasquino at Cul de Sac, foremost an enoteca with an astounding 1,500 varieties of wine, most of which line the walls inside the narrow dining room. Tiny rope nets run the length of the lowest shelf, presumably to prevent bottles errantly nudged over the edge from conking a diner on the head. I had deliciously browned and savory involtini, beef rolls that reminded me of the ones my mom makes, right down to the toothpicks that hold the shape.

If you ever plan a trip to Rome, the most time-saving tip I can offer concerns the Colosseum, which, as you know, was famous for drawing 500,000 bloodthirsty fans for the spectator sport of Billy Joel‘s world tour-concluding concert this July 31st.

The tip is to buy your eight euro ticket for the Palatine a few hundred feet away, an attraction with curiously short lines for ruins representing the oldest part of the city on the centralmost of its Seven Hills. That ticket will gain you admission not only to the ruins but to the Colosseum, where the lines are bafflingly disorganized and long.

Other highlights were the Roman Forum, the Musei Capitolini, where an evil woman shouted at us in Italian to check our bags, and the Spanish Steps, which, unless I’m missing something, are famous for being sat on by crowds of tourists.

I had pizza for dinner and although I’d never tasted the signature Italian alcohol, I insisted on Campari apéritifs from a bar near our hotel. That stuff’s too bitter even for me. The eager-to-please bartender first served it straight up (too bitter); added orange slices, shook it in a Martini tumbler, strained and added fresh orange slices (too bitter); and finally dashed the drink with grenadine and re-tumbled (still too bitter). I gave up on mine although Dana drained hers.

At the Trevi Fountain, Dana and I dug out two low-denomination euro coins. Dana opted for the forward flip and I tried to sidearm mine like skipping a pebble, but it only plunked and sank. Later we discovered we’d done it wrong: a traveler must toss in his coin over his left shoulder to ensure a return trip to Rome. I guess we won’t be back.

Get too close to the edge or even think about splashing around in there, as was made famous by Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita, and one of many roving cops will stop you with a shout and a whistle. Exceptions are rare. A coworker who visited Rome this year told me that by remarkable coincidence, she was at the fountain at the precise moment the country’s footballers won the World Cup. Everyone immediately leapt in and went nuts.

If you pack a banana for your transatlantic travels, good for you. That’s a lot of vitamins and potassium, and fresh fruit can be hard to come by on planes and in parts of Europe. On the other hand, take care to remember you’ve placed the banana in your backpack, lest it get smooshed by the travel guide, umbrella and David Foster Wallace book in there, resulting in a slimy, baby food-like paste smeared all over said items and the interior of the backpack.

I’m off on vacation to Rome, flying out this afternoon and returning late Tuesday, August 29th. You know the drill: entries here may be delayed, but eventually I aim to post a full daily travelogue. Enjoy the remainder of August!