27.4—Up the Stairs Across the Street from the Half-Open Door

How many times I'd visited this turn in the road...#19...I'd recognized it at one, it was so familiar to me. Now I was getting out of the car at the very address:




Why was the door open? For me...should I call on the phone...climb the stairs and knock...Tony had to get back to work...it was raining...I turned to go up the stone steps across the street so that the mystery might be revealed. Except the steps weren't stone but brick. And no need to discover what lay behind the trees at the top. The trees had been cut back. There was nothing there but trash.





We saw no one but an ancient woman dressed in black, a man pulling down an iron door on a garage, and a woman in boots and a black leather jacket who despite her attempt to cultivate that urban Italian look merely looked out of place in the deserted and narrow street.

At one point, we turned down a steep sloping road that was so narrow, I was afraid we were going to have to back out. As we inched our way down and through, then up and out, I just wanted to leave. We stopped at the guard rail on the hill for a view of the city that is known for its factories, especially for tuna packing.






And then the rain began to pour down, and we were gone.






Why was there no public transportation in or out of this mountain town?
Would the experience have been different on a sunny day in late spring. Perhaps if I'd had the words in Italian to express my emotions they would not have become so tangled on the way back to Pizzo.

I knew now why my grandparents left. My grandfather went twice before he stayed just before the end of the 19th century. My grandmother joined him in 1902. What I saw was likely what they experienced, those narrow confining roads with no way out except to leave.

Except they never left. My grandmother never learned to speak English, although all five of her children had college educations. My grandfather was a man with a lonely dark spirit, a man with the soul of a tragic opera...a shoemaker able to translate Dante into English and work algebra problems for fun. I wasn't quite twenty-one when he died. But I'd had a nip or two of his wine, and it was fabulous. He had a wonderful family who, had he given them the opportunity, would have showered him with the love they had for him.

But my grandfather was an angry man, never satisfied, unable to find...what might it have been that he was seeking...perhaps something we might call importance. He once threw the Black Hand out of his shoemaker shop, refusing to pay the extortion fee for protection. They never came back.

There was intense prejudice against Italians, especially poor Italians. Yet, my grandfather was so personable to professional people he encountered that they would visit him at his shop and house, just to engage in conversation. What did they talk about? He never conversed with the family.

He was like that town he tried to escape, high up on a hill with no way in or out except by leaving. But he never left that spiritless place behind. And his darkness shadowed the family.

Back in Pizzo, Tony and Carmelina left me at a restaurant near the sweeping seaside cliff.





It reminded me of Oregon. I sat in the restaurant not knowing if I wanted a glass of wine or a good cry. Tony had given me his phone number for the drive along the coast back to the train station. But I needed to remain sharp and unemotional to ensure my way out. I still had that boarded up train station ahead of me.

As I sat eating my risotto, it was hard to swallow. Emotions I'd not expected began to rise up from deep within, and the truth of the day began shape-shifting like those strange moments in mythology or fiction where characters change to achieve a purpose, to escape, or to live out punishment....

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#27.3—The Road to Maierato

Under the black hood in the black coat was a friendly looking woman, about my age, but grandmotherly with sandy hair. She spoke no English. Okay, I thought, here I go and began running on in Italian. She listened intently and kindly to my story. "Vuota," I could hear myself repeat in reference to la stazione...empty, empty. I could then hear my Italian getting worse and my voice becoming shriller as I explained that I had no ticket back to Lamezia. "Non preoccupare, non preoccupare," she said, touching my arm gently. Don't worry...I could buy my ticket on the train.

Why was I here in Pizzo, she asked.

I explained that I had wanted to meet my Italian family, but that everything seemed to be going wrong. The woman introduced herself as Carmelina and put her arm around me in a gesture saying I should go with her.

I went. We were soon knocking at a door, just down the road from the train station. The door opened. A young woman answered, a small boy at her side. Carmelina explained my situation, except that she kept focusing on the part of the story that had to do with transportation. It wasn't until the story of my search for family surfaced that the lady of the house opened the door and invited me in. It was a modest and well-kept home. We stood in a large entryway with doors and steps off to the right. To the left was a kitchen, small with a table and chairs taking up most of the middle of room and also a sitting area with an L-shaped sofa facing a TV and a large box overflowing with toys and children's art supplies.

This lady of the house knew a few words of English, which helped speed up removal of the boulders of incomprehension from the pathway of communication.

The story of my pilgrimage and the story of their family began taking shape simultaneously as Antonio, Carmelina's son and the man of the house arrived home. May I add here that in my mental state, it took a while for me to get the names so that I kept wondering why Carmelina and Tony kept referring to Mother Teresa. Was this some kind of Italian way of imploring help for my safety. I finally realized Tony's wife was Mariateresa.

Meanwhile, the three of them would leave me in my minimalist Italian world and begin that thing Italians do...talking fast and loud and all at once, appearing at times to be assessing the stupidity of the others in the conversation...out of which generally comes a conclusion that can be boiled down into a simple sentence...occasionally but rarely with an subordinate clause or phrase.

Anyway, it was proposed to me that a friend with a car might drive me to Maierato for a price. Great. Phone calls were made. However, the friend with the car was working. More rapid fire discussion ensued. Another solution emerged. But this one turned out to be a compound-complex sentence solution:
Tony had to go to work. However, he could drop me off in Maierato and pick me up three hours later. Now I'd just met these people. And nice and caring as they seemed, I was haunted by what a friend of my father's had told me at Dad's funeral: "Do not go to Calabria alone. The people there will take advantage of you. You will be in great danger."

I said that since my relative did not seem to be available and that the rain was now falling heavily and that there was no transportation in or out of Maierato, I did not feel safe being left there alone.

In Italian, you don't say I'm afraid, you say I have fear. For the first time, I was not afraid. I had fear. Having it, I needed to manage it. The negotiations began. Finally, it was decided that Tony would go late to work. He would drive me and bring me back for what seemed like a reasonable price, given the several hours it would require.

I felt a bit unsettled driving off with a stranger and so to my delight and relief, Carmelina went out to the car with us. This was great! And so off we went. I imagined an awkward silent drive with the non English speakers. But suddenly...what was it...perhaps the thought that after all these years, I was going to see Maierato and had pretty much arranged it all in Italian, what the heck: I wasn't afraid of making mistakes. I had fear. If you aren't something but merely have it, you can set it aside. And so I did.

I could hear myself making mistakes as we jabbered away, but I did not have fear. Without this fear, I could also hear that I was making fewer mistakes as we wound through the towns and countryside and began an ascent up a mountain into fog...nebbia. The fog was such an issued that we exchanged words for it, and repeated the words to be sure we had them.

The road was narrow. I am sure of this because for a while, the road was all I could see. We were talking about olive groves and how people make olive oil in their kitchens. Just at the moment I was learning the word for this, a car came careening through the fog toward us so that after it passed, Tony crossed himself. As a result, I forgot the word for making olive oil in one's kitchen. In a few moments, the fog lifted so that I could see I was now in the wild world of Calabria: A windswept rugged world where ruins and houses coexist and where it's sometimes difficult to tell one from the other. The fog cleared to a haziness. White letters on a sky-blue background of a rectangular road sign said MAIERATO.

pronounced...you gotta say all the syllables: mahyee-ehr-AH-toh, with the tongue against the front teeth for that t sound.

It was really happening. I was going there. But the fog closed in again as we continued to follow the road curving upward. The sea was out there to our right. That's all I knew for sure. Trees began to make themselves known. Rain was falling harder now. Even the natives were shocked at this turn of weather in sunny southern Italy.

And then, we came out of the fog into the rain, the wipers swiping back and forth. And there it was: The Maierato cemetery. Had it be a lovely day with time for me to spare, who knows what I might have discovered there. Undoubtedly Rocco Serrao and his family, minus my grandmother.




Around the bend was the town. I appeared to have far less spirit in than the cemetery. I was filled with a mixture of excitement and sadness.




Even the church looked sad, standing there in the square all alone surrounded by a dispirited town with no way in or out except for those with their own means of transportation.




I'd described to Tony and Carmelina the pictured I'd seen of Polma's house on Google. Across the street were stone steps leading up from a sweet sidewalk cafe. I had imagined myself going up those step, discovering what mystery lay behind the trees at the top.

The sign on the building to the left in the second picture above turned out to be the sign for Polma's street. The rain had fallen off to a drizzle. We would stop so I could climb those steps. We were all eager to know....


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#27.2—If Bergman Had Been Italian

There is only one thing worse than begin terrified of something—being terrified of nothing.

Trying to cope with that volatile station agent in Lamezia in Italian was a sunny day at the beach compared to finding myself alone in front of that boarded up train station...not the hint of a single person up and about in this little town at 11 a.m....and where were all those seaside resort facilities for which Pizzo was noted?

Not that I didn't find myself laughing at the absurdity of it all. Alex Haley had turned the search for roots through slavery and injustice into an acclaimed miniseries. More recently on TV, famous people had journeyed down the genealogical path into marvelous places of personal revelation. I ended up at a boarded up train station on the edge of an inhospitable sea in a seemingly lifeless town. My laughter was brief, lost to the sound of the mean green sea and gray indifference of the sky.

If Bergman had been an Italian filmmaker, I was living a script he would have written. I was not entirely in control of my mind but walking through it. The life I had lived for the last seventy years...family, friends, my sweet little house in Oregon...the awards, rewards, and struggles with the education system...the damned washer back in Rome that wouldn't wring my clothes dry...that splendid dinner the night before at the Europa in Lamezia...all of it seemed part of a distant past I would never again be able to access. I'd been dropped off at a place between life and death...left to...to...what?

I began talking out loud to myself. It was all I had to tell me I was real...except for my little traveling companion. I usually leave him in the hotel but was glad that at the last minute I'd stuck him inside my jacket pocket:




I then noted, also out loud to myself that I'd been afraid that the little Italian I knew would be irrelevant in the midst of the Calabrese dialect. Now language, any language, even my own, was irrelevant.

If a tree falls in the forest with no one there, does it make a sound?
If there is nowhere to go, do you just keep walking?
I considered crying. But that would only make me thirsty, and there was no where to pee. Even when alone in a desolate place, one must retain decorum and not pee in the street.

My mother and father felt like tangible presences, as when those departed return to you in a dream...so real to your mind even in those brief minutes when you awaken to what is...real?

Nothing in my life had ever felt so real as the being present in the days and hours preceding their deaths...each breath so real...each word so precious. The last thing my mother had said was, "These next few days will be difficult for you girls." My sisters and I, all adults, still her girls.

As he awaited the morphine, my dad, scientist to the end, had reflected, "I'm looking forward to seeing of all those theological stories are true."
I had no such caring or reflective thoughts. I longed only for the chance to pop that Italian-tenor CD into the player on the little brown shelf in my beloved house, turn up that song with the title I can never remember, and dance with my Cat-Prince Reno...my big bunchy orange boy. When the neighbor makes a crack that Reno could lose a few pounds, I say, no, he needs that big bunchy body to contain his big heart and even bigger spirit.

I remember the blissful moments in my garden with all four cats supervising as I landscaped my yard with beds of stone...learning only after the gardens and pathways had been built, how I should have done it...realizing finally that tearing them apart and starting over was not the answer...the answer was to enjoy what had come from the bliss.

In fact, it had been in building the gardens back in 2004 that I first thought of traveling to Calabria. I couldn't afford a landscaper. No one had done anything with my yard in the twenty-some years since the house had been built. The yard was clay and crabgrass. I decided on rock...a beautiful dark rock that had once been on the bottom of the sea.

Because of the angle of the house, the truck had to dump the rock in the front so that I then had to haul it wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow around to the back of the house. I started by following all the instructions from a book on building rock walls. Using stakes and string, I laid out a perfect circle. My friend Jim showed me how to dig a drainage trench that I would then fill with gravel to drain water from under the garden walls. He got me started with, oh, eighteen inches of trench. Then he left. And there I was alone with my new pick ax, shovel, ten yards of rock, ten yards of gravel, and my plan for a circle ten feet in diameter.

After three days of trying to dig, haul, and build within those damned strings, I began to get a feel for the rock. The rocks began speaking to me about their dimensions...weight...size...it was kind of mystical...me and the rock, and the cats hanging out in the sun following me back and forth with the wheelbarrow, building the round wall...I tossed the string and stakes to the side and within days had a perfect circle built on eighteen-inch drainage trenches filled with gravel. Okay, Ross my nephew mathematician...am I right...the circumference of a circle ten feet in diameter would be...(pause) C = pi r squared...78.5 feet????




Anyway, it was in building my first gardens that I cast of the system, took what I needed from the books, what I had learned from my study of Zen, and just loved the rocks and let them love me back. The backyard led to the front.




It was during this process that I learned from my Aunt Carrie that my Italian ancestors worked with stone. It was in my blood. One day my dear neighbor Peggy popped over from across the street to compliment and support my effort. It happened to be during the 2008 election, and our politics differed. I found myself becoming agitated by our differences. And so to change the subject, I asked if she might use her expertise in genealogy to help me track my Italian ancestors. Being the generous soul and marvelous neighbor that she is, she vanished into her house and returned in short order with all sorts of information.

Now at the time, I was teaching myself French with the idea of becoming more, well, I don't know, everything the French have that is not in my disordered, naive, insecure temperament. I never really liked French. It was an exercise in self-improvement. But within hours after Peggy provided me with documents of my grandparents' emigration from Maierato, I said out loud to the cats: "Why on earth am I studying French. I'm Italian." I immediately ordered an assortment of Italian grammar books from Amazon. For my birthday, my dad bought me Rosetta Stone. Through the internet, I found five Cutuli families living in Maierato and after some months of study, wrote them all letters saying that I would like to meet them.

No reply...until one day I arrived at the Netarts post office. "You got a letter," Lyn said, her voice full of excitement...a letter? I opened my box. And there it was...a letter from Italia. Polma Cutuli, said the return address.

She said, in Italian, that all the Cutuli families in Maierato were all related, and so I was part of the family and would be welcome. She even called me in Oregon to say she hoped I would come. When I noted that the call cost her a lot of money, she said, "Non e' importante."

I had planned to visit when in Florence, but at the last minute Polma called to say that there'd been a death in the family in Canada, so she couldn't be there to meet me. In preparation for the Rome trip, I wrote several letters but received no response. Yet when I called from Rome, she seemed genuinely excited that I would be arriving. But then when I got to Lamezia, someone from that phone number hung up on me...and then never answered my calls.

I'd given Cinzia the Plant to Orlanda, the manager at my hotel in Lamezia. She was delighted and placed Cinzia in the little breakfast area for the guests. I'd been tempted to just stay in Lamezia for two days, as I'd paid for the hotel and my train ticket. But there was nothing to do in Lamezia. Going to Pizzo was merely something to do with the off chance I could find a way to Maierato...just to say I'd been there, after having made such a big deal about going there.

All these things crashed at me like the mean green sea dashing itself against the shore on the other side of the row of houses to my left. Other people were living normal lives with families and jobs. "What the hell am I doing here?" I said out loud to no one.

It suddenly felt like one of those moments when death is so imminent that being alive is almost too much to bear.

There'd been a short break in the rain. It began falling again out of the moody uncaring sky.

About twenty yards in front of me, a figure in a black coat, hood up, emerged from one of the narrow passageways between the houses to my left...

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#27-On the Train to Calabria and La Mia Famiglia

At 6 a.m., Cinzia the Plant and I set off to the train station with Fabio at the wheel. We were over an hour early just to be sure we wouldn't get lost in rush hour. As it turned out, all went smoothly. We had a comfortable first-class passage with plenty of room for Cinzia on the luggage rack above me. Here she is all ready for travel prior to departure.




Cinzia was feeling very special, the only plant in the station, the only plant on our train. We both slept for most of the journey. I woke up as we approached Napoli and the headed south. As we arrived in Calabria, the land became more wild. Hills grew into forested mountains with great slashes of rock exposed on one side of the track to the wind sweeping in from the sea on the other. The sea was a beautiful but full of a mythic danger...I guess I mean by this that I could see how it would inspire tales of intemperate and mighty gods.




There were small clusters of homes here and there. From time to time, some ruined stone structure would jut up as a reminder that this land had every intention of taking its toll. I wondered what my grandparents had thought as they may have passed this way to board their ship from Napoli to America.

There was something about the sweep of landscape and worn aged appearance of the houses that suggested that not much had changed in the last hundred years, except to get older and more determined to survive the wild.

The train was right on time. The station was colorful.


And my hotel was just a short walk from the station.





The town seemed very much like Tillamook in spirit, except the cows were in the meat shops instead of the fields, no one spoke English, and there was no rain...or so I thought...

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#27.1-Tempo Brutto

(Dear readers you might wish to read 27 first. The wifi here is not good. Things I've tried to save in the past just disappeared so I think I'll just post this out of order. Also forgive typos. I want to get this down while it's fresh, and I don't have my external keyboard.)

The news is not good. In Italia the term for bad weather is tempo brutto. Really bad...Tempo brutissimo. Well, it's brutissimo. In sunny seaside Italy it is raining to rival any rain in Oregon. Il mio ombrello will be small comfort. My relative who seemed so enthusiastic about my arrival is not answering her phone. Yesterday someone there hung up on me. And all the extensive research I did for this trip, I am staying in the wrong city for convenient access to my destination--my grandparents home town of Maierato in Calabria.

The good news is that hotel does not have that mosquito net,promised by booking.com, and there is no need for one. In fact, I adore the wonderful old couple who own the Hotel Piccolo. I don't think you will find a surgery facility that is cleaner...although given the germs in hospitals these days, I could be doing this place a disservice by the comparison.

Cinzia the Plant survived the train ride verynwell but now wonders also what she's doing here. I've decided to leave her at the hotel with Pasquale and his sweet wife...don't know her name yet and Lulu the dog....a small brown and white dog of mutt origins who wears a fine white leather collar with rhinestones.

The wifi only reaches the downstairs. I have to walk down just two floors because when they learned I was here to meet the family they moved me down from the top floor and have been like a supportive aunt and uncle.

And talk about kind.. No restaurant opens until around eight for dinner. But the Europa took me in at 6:45 because I was starving. The risotto with vegetables they created for me was squisito...molto bello...fantastico. Since I was alone they turned on the TV to occupy me while i sipped my wine. The program was a kind of Italian Animal Planet. I joked that this was to help me with my Italian.

With a glass of vino, it came to 8€, about $10. I left 2€ additional, not required as the servizio was included. on the way back to the hotel, i turned around, went back, and gave them the going rate in Rome. They were resistant but very happy when I insisted...however, I think they were more entertained than anything by my description in Italian of the wonderful service and beautiful meal.

In fact, no one here speaks English. It has been an adventure, especially at the train station here in La Mezia Terme where there are no schedules to take home to study, the wifi is iffy, and the one huge schedule is on the wall next to the ticket counter and quick-ticket machines. So while the town isn't busy, there is a massive crowd at the station office. The ticket master, and he is that, often doubles a Customer Service agent. He is a cranky bald man who can go from kind to annoyed to berserk for no clear reason. I have been lucky to experience only annoyed.

When it became clear that reaching Maierato from here or anywhere was nothing anyone wanted to do except for a very large amount do cash, I realized my prospects were grim. I could stay here for two long tedious days, or I could take the train to Pizzo with the hope of finding someone to get me up the mountain to the town where no one wanted to go...a fact confirmed that this place has no formal transportation to or from it. As a result taxis are molto costoso.

My first indication of the strangeness that lay ahead was the train itself.





The second was the conversation with the two friendly men on the platform. Having come to mistrust instructions, I wanted to be sure this was the train that would take me to my roots.

I asked. The man above looked at the other man, who looked like maybe an attorney or business man. He rolled his eyes. " Speriamo," he replied and laughed. (We hope) He then explained that this train usually leaves from another track. We waited. The break in the rain stopped. The man above got on the train. It began to pour. I got on the train, soon followed by the third commuter...who nodded toward the speaker shouting out some static. "Confirmata," he said. We all settled in.

The next hint I had of the strange turn was the realization that began to dawn when I got off the train alone in Pizzo and found the station boarded up. Tight.



I had no return ticket, thinking I would let events of the day determine whether I took the 5:30 or 6:30.

It was now 11:00 a.m. The word deserted does not cover the fact that I walked for fifteen minutes and saw no one, no hint that this so-called resort town was inhabited. The sea to my left was wild and inhospitable.





This was clearly the craziest thing I'd ever done in my life. I was suddenly terrified.

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#28—Voluesia and the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary

Right in the center of Rome is the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary named for the archeological site where approximately 150 abandoned cats now live. Here they are cared for by tireless volunteers and vets who donate their time and services. Like so many groups dedicated to spay/neuter programs and helping abandoned animals, this sanctuary depends mainly on private donations.




The ruins where the cats now reign date back to the 4th century and were uncovered by chance in 1926. There are as many as four temples that were built during the time of Imperial Rome.





The ruins are home to, you may remember, Voluesia.


Spelling correction: Voluesia.
Pronounced: voh-LUTZ-ee-ah

And to George Clooney:





Quite a resemblance, don't you think? George had been confined indoors with an illness when I first met him, but was allowed to go out on one of my subsequent visits. They make very effective use of modest but impressive indoor facility located below street level at one end of the ruins.











Meet Morgan. He's been here for 10 years and loves it.






While Voluesia enjoys the passers by on one side of the sanctuary, across the way is her calico rival for public attention: Oprah Winfrey.





Not to worry, she merely enjoys careful but harmless observation.





While the sanctuary does everything possible to find homes for adoptable cats, many are feral. Like my darling Voluesia. I met Tanya, a volunteer who moved to Rome from Germany and who came rushing over when she heard I was adopting Voluesia "from a distance." Tanya rescued Voleusia and brought her to the sanctuary, fell in love with the place, and became a volunteer. Voleusia's eyes were covered with infection and injured. It was feared she'd be blind. But she's now got her one good eye, and is quite popular with passers by.

There's no language barrier when folks gather to admire and pet the cats.






I love Rome so much that I figured I needed a Rome cat...not to call my own...Voleuzia, the independent little two-year-old that she is wouldn't put up with that.

But here's what I'm thinking. It's $240 a year for "adoption from a distance." We've got a lot of cats and organizations in America that need our support. But what if I started a group, just as a kind of trans-Atlantic gesture of solidarity with animal lovers. Paws for Paisans.

Check out the Web site you see on the first picture on this post. Then would you consider donating $1.00 a year to Paws for Paisans to help me maintain my adoption for Voleusia. Maybe get $1.00 from your friends and neighbors who are animal lovers, and we could adopt another cat or just offer support in general to the sanctuary.

Please send all names of contributors so I can let the cats and their caretakers know who is helping me maintain adoption of Voleusia and offering support to the abandoned and otherwise lonely. Would you also include email addresses of contributors who would like to see the monthly report the sanctuary will send to me.

I also know my four cats, Reno, Q and A, and MO, intend to write to the cats at the sanctuary, Pen Paws, if you will. If you're interested, I will be happy to share their emails with you. They will be writing in Italian, but I will be happy to translate at no extra cost to you. They are all very charismatic writers.

As you will see on the sanctuary Web site, all cats are sterilized, fed, and cared for medically. They also get a lot of TLC. There are two indoor rooms on either side of the main room I showed you above. Here cats with medical problems are kept warm and safe and have a home for life. I told you a little about that in a previous blog post.

If you don't live near me, please send your $1.00 to Paws for Paisans: c/o Joan Cutuly, P.O. Box 156, Netarts, OR 97143. I promise you that every penny will go to the cats. I will be responsible for transfer fees as we change the dollars into euros through PayPal. I hope to get a great response, not just so we can help the cats and feel the joy of an international connection between cat lovers, but because I think the email exchanges will be a lot of fun.










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#24.3—Truth, Beauty, and The Market

The Roman Forum was ancient Rome's market. It's right across the street from the Colosseum and wasn't just for buying and selling, although there was a lot of trade traffic with booty and goods brought in from the provinces. But there was also the old Roman senate building and the rostrum (to the left in the picture below) where Cicero ranted about the corruption of wealth and power.




The rostrum is also where Marc Antony offered Julius Caesar the crown, which he hypocritically refused. The rest was history. Every day someone leaves flowers inside the memorial to Caesar.




I first saw the ruins from the Capitoline Hill overlooking them. It was way vaster than I had imagined with triumphal arches, temples to gods, temples to politicians, and the formerly bustling market place in the grassy center below.








To the right in the following photo are the columns of the Temple to Saturn. The senate building is barely visible, just behind the big rectangular walls of the Arch of Septimus Severus. Carved in the arch are reliefs showing the defeated "barbarians" being marched back to Rome in humiliation. At the other end of the forum is the Arch of Titus celebrating the defeat of Judea in 70 a.d., a defeat so complete that all that the Romans left was what is today called The Wailing Wall.




You can walk down the Via Sacra, the main road of the market, where you now walk on the same stones Caesar Augustus walked.




It was just two years after the defeat of Judea that Vespasian began building the Colosseum, which was completed eight years later. Rome was a bustling place with eople buying and selling stuff coming in from all over the Roman world.
Trajan's market is right across the street. Trajan became emperor in 98 A.D. It was under his command as a general though, that the empire reached it's greatest sprawl.




At the far end of Trajan's Market is a 140' column with a relief spiraling upward with images of his conquering of Dacia (now Romania).
Empire brought a lot to the people of Rome. The emperors spent a lot of money maintaining support by keeping the people happy.
It was said by a writer of the time that Romans "liked food and games."
When the Colosseum opened in 80 A.D., the games went on for 100 days. I believe something like 7,000 exotic animals were killed for sport. Being a gladiator was a big thing. But not like you see in the movies. Gladiators, both slaves and free men, were highly trained. They fought only two or three times a year because the emperors who paid the trainers didn't want to lose too many gladiators. If a gladiator survived, slaves were freed after six years...free men after three.

And oh yea, about the thumbs up, thumbs down...Yes, thumbs up did mean the compromised gladiator would live. But instead of thumbs down, it was thumbs sideways. The thumbs, you see, represented the gladiator's legs. Up, meant he could walk away. Sideways, he was lying down, a goner.
There were doors at either end of the Colosseum. One for the winners to leave. The other for the losers. These high doors were also used to bring in elephants. Generally, the crowd was down for slaughter. Except for the day the elephants being killed started crying out. Although the people protested, no one in the crowd did anything to stop it.

Tigers and lions came up from under the Colosseum floor in trap doors covered by sand so no one knew where they might suddenly and dramatically appear. Tens of thousands of animals were killed in the games and used to kill prisoners. It was eerie and distressing to imagine these dark tunnels lighted only by small oil lamps where animals were kept in cages and hoisted up through elaborate pulley systems, then set free for the slaughter.




What is there about empire that loves blood so much?
The emperors curried favor with the people by providing the games. There were prizes galore. Round wooden balls were thrown into the grow. Depending on the marking on the ball, the poor citizen might receive a slave or bread for a year. No cheap T-shirts or keychains back then.

I left the old market places and sports arena wondering what might be said in 2000 years about Wall Street, our malls, and our Super Bowl stadiums. How might they come to ruin? For surely they will.


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