Tusci

Horrors!  I've been away from this for what feels like a long time. 

Life - and work - in Rome can be consuming.

How about a trip to Villa Giulia, site of the famous Etruscan Museum?

Let's go, then.

The Spouse and I visited this place on a Friday evening, which for us makes a perfect date night. 

Because we are bonafide geeks, of course.

I would heartily recommend visiting museums on the weekends or Thursdays when they have extended hours. One thing is for sure:  there are no school or big tourist groups to contend with.

Aside from maybe a dozen or so other patrons, it was empty.

The interior courtyard of a Renaissance villa converted into an award-winning museum with a LARGE number of artifacts.

A Neptune-themed pavement in the grotto below

Who were the Etruscans?  The forerunners of the Romans.  The last two kings of the beginnings of ancient Rome were Etruscan (my favorite being Tarquinius Superbus - because saying 'soo-PUR-bus' is fun and because it means 'arrogant.'  Now go call your arrogant friend '(Name)-us Superbus').

We call the middle region of Italy - the lovely hills and mountains where grapes and olives are grown in abundance, and the Renaissance later flourished - Tuscany, because this is where the Etruscans lived...the Romans called them 'Tusci.'  

And the Romans, ever fond of adopting forms, materials and motifs from neighbors, incorporated a lot of Etruscan structures, funerary art forms and the like from these neighbors, who lived mostly north of Rome. Mostly. 

A cinerary urn.

Another cinerary urn - of a very wealthy woman, we can surmise:  look at her couch with its relief carvings, her jewelry and her palm frond-fan...

A re-creation of an Etruscan temple.  None exist today, because they were principally made of wood. This is a lovely courtyard, by the way.

Case after case after case...and not one visitor obstructing our view.  Lovely. 

The Etruscans were in contact with Ancient Greeks, clearly.  Note the similarities of style on this vase. 

I can't help but think about Minoan bull-leaping frescos and sculptures when I see this.  But this is in bronze, a metal that the Etruscans were known for working with.

The most famous Etruscan piece of all, probably:  the husband and wife sarcophagus.  There is one other example of this in the Louvre.  Art historians ascribe their archaic smiles to the ancient intent to portray someone as 'alive.'  

Made of terracotta and lifesize, this piece illustrates something that the Greeks found disturbing about the Etruscans:  their women.  To be specific:  their 'audacious' women. Etruscan women were very visible in society; they were literate, they kept their surnames after marriage, they could own their own property, and they (gasp!) partied in the same social gatherings with their husbands.. Greek women didn't do this.  Roman women didn't do this. 

I adore her pointy shoes and the ruffle of her dress.

Aside from this awkward back side of the piece (textbooks and websites so rarely show us the back sides of sculptures - so here is one!), let's consider how intimate the feeling is.  These two seem to be very engaged with one another, as they recline on their couch that doubles as their sarcophagus. 

                                       One day I'll get the chance to visit Cerveteri, where their tombs are located, in which everything you                                                                                  would need in the afterlife would be carved in relief in the soft volcanic rock. 

Let's not forget, too, that is is made of baked clay.  Hence, the hole in the top of his head. 

So much ceramic statuary and vessels!

And lots of bronze.  Etruscans mined various metals and created gorgeous bronzes.

The incised images on this mirror - one of many - make me think of Picasso drawings, stylistically.

Art history students of mine will remember that we begin discussing Etruria with a gold fibula.  This one is not that one.  Here is another one.
A wealthy people, deeply invested in trade with Mesopotamian cultures.

Bronze laurel wreaths, anyone?

Why not capture a tale involving an unusual (true) sighting of an elephant?

Etruscan temple fragments

Note that affinity for the Greek key, or 'meander' pattern

Apulu - or Apollo - life-size and in terracotta.  He would have graced a temple roof.

Along with some other friends in the Etruscan pantheon. Note how they stride forward with purpose.

A gold jewelry collection!

Hair pins  - for those elaborate 'dos.

The lovely, much maligned Juno (or Uni, actually), goddess of the hearth. She actually comes from a sub-culture that is not, technically, Etruscan, even though it was situated in Etruria.  She is Faliscan.  

So, you find yourself in Rome.  You've seen the Roman Forum, you've walked ancient pavements, and you've wondered 'who came before them?'

This is your answer.   GO see this museum.

Unfaithful

Dear Certain Favorite Restaurant in Atlanta, with a great bar, heavily tattooed & hardworking staff, possessive of the Best Burger in Atlanta award several times over,

We have been unfaithful.

We unabashedly love you.  We love your venues, we love your spirit and attitude, and we love that we can visit your place over the course of years and still see the same wait staff working there.  That's loyalty.

And we have professed our love for you in countless visits, to have the Black and Blue, the Blue 'Shroom, the Swiss Mushroom and the Four Horsemen.  And with tots.  Always with the tots.  We're sorry that you stopped serving the turkey burger option, but we're still good with guilt-ridden dining on occasion, and for that, we'll still see you.

We are grateful that these items can be accompanied by a small range of nice cold ciders, too.

 But here's the thing:  we've relocated on an extended basis, and the option to see you has now been drastically limited...

...and so, shamefaced and desperate, we eventually went looking for other paramours...

And ohmygoodness...we found one.

We're so sorry.  But we found one!

This is not to say that we didn't find another good, reliable purveyor of burgers here.  We did.  And we'll return to them, even if their ideas about burger toppings are...a little unusual.

But as long as Open Baladin of Rome is in our (squeal!) neighborhood, we will check in there first.

It may be painful for us and for you to see these photographs, but we feel the need to come clean:

That's right, onlookers, that's a wall of beer.  Craft beer made by the purveyor as well as select others.

Be still, my heart.  Excellent wings.  Note the use of environmentally minded, crafted and folded paper vessels for condiments.

For everyone who thought that Italy was just populated by little dark osterias and tavernas, with the signature red and white checked tablecloths, the old Chianti bottles covered in rivulets of candle wax, a mustachio'd, stained-apron-wearing nonna who brought you spaghetti with meatballs to eat while an accordion player wheezed out the Godfather theme...here is your stereotype-killer. You're welcome.

Funky logo design work

Hand-made chips, sprinkled with paprika? Why, yes.

When I told a longtime friend that I might be moving to Rome, she said with characteristic sarcasm:
'I hear they have some art there.'
The post script to that is: it turns out that some of that art is edible.
The stats: thick, lovely hand-formed burger, made only with Piemontese beef, all organic toppings, locally made sesame seed bun.
That amazing bun.
And when you order 'medium' and it arrives, blatantly dark pink in the middle, you turn to Mr. Food Safety, a.k.a. The Spouse, and you ask, 'do you think that this is o.k.?'* He doesn't answer right away because... 

WARNING: you should look away, if the images are too much carnivorism for you to handle.

Do you see any concern on that face?

It appears as though he's saying something, but it was not an answer to my question.  It was something like:
oh my...wow...this is such a mess...but it's SO...
And then, he said no more. 

...except for when he flagged down the tatted/pierced server and asked for a beer.

So, we should close this confessional in order to spare us all any more pain.

It's hard to say this, but we remain loyal - only stateside.

And while we're away from you, we have a 'girl in this port,' and she's amazing.

Hopefully, you can forgive us.

Love always,
The Relocated Americans

p.s.  We would like to assure you that we don't think we'll ever find even a temporary replacement for your other place, which we miss terribly.

*Actually, there is a quality explanation from The Spouse about the color of the beef in my burger (which I spared all vegetarian readers from having to actually see).  After a couple (ahem) different burgers on a couple different visits to this fine establishment, it is clear that the color of the meat is richer and well, redder.  So it's not that my burger was underdone.  It's that the color of the meat is different due to different standards.  The Spouse - who has worked extensively in food safety- explained it like this:
'American beef IS pale, because it's pretty anemic and fatty.  Think about what we do to cows (we don't let them roam much, if at all) and what we feed them (corn and antibiotics), and how Western European countries used to do this too, for awhile, until they started to draw links between rampant use of antibiotics and drug resistant strains of bacteria.  So about 15 years ago, they quit.  The Dutch and the Danes were the first, and everyone else has pretty much followed suit.  What do the cows eat here?  Grass, and not corn, sans antibiotics - the way Mother Nature intended - in open fields.
I'll be sure to snap some shots of those happy roaming bovines at some point in the future.  Moo!

Screenings

Confession:  when we first set ourselves firmly on this journey to living in Rome, I worried that I would not be able to enjoy going to the movies.

In all of my visits to this fascinating city, I never thought about movie-going. I never noticed a single cinema. From all of my visits here, I remembered exactly zero theaters.  Why would I have done that when the art and architecture held me in full sway?

But I love going to the movies.  Love.  I always have.  It probably stems from growing up in a valley in the Blue Ridge mountains where, let's face it, there were not a thousand things to do.

What did I do there for recreation, if I wasn't going to movies?

As a kid, if you were lucky, you knew someone with a pool or you went to a public one.  Two lakes - one natural and one man-made - were available if you could get to them.

And, I have to admit, as a child of the seventies, there was roller skating. A lot of it.  If not in rinks, then in home basements.  With the requisite white booted skates with colored wheels, and striped tube socks pulled up to just below the knees.

Don't worry - I will not be showing any pictures of that.

And there was this, too.  No, none of the corporate amusement parks nearer to Richmond or the eastern side of Virginia.  No, this was in my hometown.

Lots of mostly tame rides run by surly teenagers who couldn't get work anywhere else, or didn't want to work too hard anywhere else.  They had hot jobs, but they weren't hard jobs.  The Umbrellas ride was for cooling off between other attractions, since the Skyway didn't move fast enough to push the air around you.  And a strange, large slide - enameled with some infernally dark color so that it became burn-the-back-of-your-thighs hot from the sun, with those nasty pieces of carpeting intended to assist your ride down to the bottom, but inevitably so trashed that they bunched up, got stuck somewhere in the grooves and ultimately left you screeching your way to the end.  The combination scorch from hot metal sticking to your skin and that herky-jerky, last third of the trip down was a special kind of pain. And the roller coaster was o.k. (watch the linked video only if you don't have an issue with heights or motion sickness), but it was - as many people fondly recall - a bit rickety.

A small town legend.  Now gone, sadly.  I'm not sure it could be more trite than this:  the whole place was replaced by a large strip mall with a grocery store.

In my teen and college years (yep, I was one of those commuters when commuting wasn't nearly as cool as it is now), you went out to eat at one of a very small number of privately owned restaurants, or far more easily, you went to some corporate/chain place.  If it was Burger King, then you went next door with your french fries and fed the ducks.  Maybe we fed too many then, too, but I don't remember having the same problem then that exists now. Ew.

In the valley, you could go shopping at one of three small malls (and the largest of them didn't exist until I was a high school graduate).  One day, I'll have to ask that friend to reminisce with me about the time I had an allergic reaction to something in one of the malls.  I sneezed, coughed, swelled up like a tomato and wound up in the emergency room - where my father came to rescue me, but walked past my exam room because my new Tweety-bird lips and swollen eyes made me completely unrecognizable.  Good times.

Of course you could go to area high school football games.  If you were into other sports, you went to minor league baseball games.

You could pretend to be a tourist in your hometown by going here.

It used to be that the Roanoke star was turned entirely red whenever there was a traffic fatality.  Now, it is perennially lit red, white and blue. Among some longstanding friends of mine, this is THE place where you take your forever love to see your home from above, and to share at least one kiss.

I suppose that you could have a few of those - loves AND kisses.

And when I was a teen, we did a lot of this.  I teamed up with friends to do it to other friends (one in particular carried the supply - sssshhhh! don't tell her parents! - because she had a Corvair with a giant front trunk that could easily hold an industrial size case of, um, supplies) and once, one lovely evening, those same friends did it to me.  They waited until I came home from my date, kissed him on the front porch and went inside. I awoke the next morning to my front yard festooned with billowing loops of white, an excited mother (yay - your friends must like you!) and a grumpy father (now, who's going to clean this mess up?).  I knew people who had perfected the roll toss so well that the resulting effect was truly an artform.  I can still hear one of them, giggling in the dark, softly saying "I like for it to be all ...swoopy."

We extended this practice to ridding the local Wendy's of its sporks, tying ribbons around each one, and inserting them upright into the lawn of a friend.  It was Christmas time.  His mother was completely charmed.

Raise your hand if you came from a town where 'cruising' was a popular thing to do.  We rode in that same Corvair down Williamson Road, looping a length through the Pancake House parking lot.  We affectionately termed it 'The Great Pancake Turnaround.' I remember laughing with girlfriends.  I remember lame, poorly formed conversations with guys in passing cars.  In retrospect:  frankly boring.

All this to say, quite simply:  there just wasn't that much to do.

So movies were a major outlet for me.  I remember seeing the debut of Star Wars.  I remember bad 3D glasses and some appallingly bad special effects in slasher films.  I remember going to see this in an historic theater downtown, and being pelted by toast.

I recall seeing Dangerous Liaisons as a young college student and thinking that I had never heard dialogue like that before. I wondered if I wasn't cut out for it, until about a third of the way through, when I began to understand it.  And love it.

I love the dark, the cool air, the popcorn and holding hands with someone while thoroughly escaping for 1.5 to 2 hours.

And I knew that even when I was in a remarkable city like Rome, with all kinds of things to do and see, I would still want to go to the movies.

So, let's address the obvious:  this is where Italians go to the movies, which should be understandable to Italians. Sure, they make their own (this is the home of Fellini, let's not forget), but they also import American ones.  Lots of them.  And they are dubbed in the primary language of the country.

How's your Italian? you might ask.  Very limited.  I start language lessons next week!

Why, look at that:  they advertise colleges as 'previews' in Italian theaters, too.

So what will this mean for the person who likes to see dialogue-rich films in, at least for the time being, their native language, which is NOT Italian? 

What?  This is coming to theaters in just a few days?  

Before solving that future problem, we elected to go see an American movie that was dubbed in Italian. No subtitles.

We saw the recent Star Trek. (click that link for a slice of what it was like to watch it in another language - there are two trailers, by the way).

I was beyond excited.

And the experience was...unique.

Tickets cost less than in the States.  So do the items you can get at the concession stand - until you remember that portion sizes of things like sodas and popcorn are radically different. My sweet Spouse, who rarely judges cultural differences, finally had a moment that afternoon:  this is medium? he asked, as he held up his 12 oz container...of Coca-Cola, with....no ice. We Americans are so accustomed to medium being massive.  Not so, here.

Although when you consider how much ice comes in that medium, it's more understandable.

And my popcorn came with no butter.  There was no option to ask for it either.

But I didn't care.  I didn't care!

We ascended three escalators to get to our theater in this multi-sala cinema. 

Everything in the place was so clean.  No sticky floors.  No overused, gross chairbacks or armrests.

We sat in our European-sized seats (hey, how about those middle-aged hips?) and watched a film that both of us admitted later to understanding all of about 5-10% of the dialogue. 

But the thing is, with a film like that, you can still easily follow the story. 

And if the acting is good (and I would maintain that this cycle of prequel Star Treks has a great team of actors), then you can even follow the humor.

And by the end, the good guys are still going to win.  

One oddity to report, though:

At the exact halfway point in the film, mid-action scene, the film stopped.  

The lights came on, and a guy with a box of concession stand offerings appeared.

For a 122 minute film, there was an intervallo.

Cute.

And at the end, in the actors' chorus of voices:

"Spazio, l'ultima frontiera." 

(you need to read this in a gravely serious voice)

So after that experience, we started to get a little more picky.  If we wanted to see a film that involved dialogue we wanted to understand, then we were going to have to determine that possibility.

My nice vegetable vendor advises me to look things up online by saying 'Googliama.' 

Googliama helps me find a website that lists films shown in 'originale' - in their original dialogue!

Hallelujah!

They don't run all the time, and sometimes there's only one showing per day that is not dubbed, but we are willing to work with this.  

So we've now seen Suicide Squad and The Family Fang in English, but with Italian subtitles.

.

Side benefit: subtitles enable you to pick up some of the language. Although with some films, what you learn most are the expletives. 

Tutorials are tutorials, regardless, right?

Every theater here is, so far, different.

2 of the 3 we've visited had concession stands.  The 3rd expected you to bring your own - but no glass containers.

So when that next Woody Allen film comes to town, I'll be packing the popcorn, a plastic bottle of water, and a notebook, for recording neurotic commentary in Italian.