Trip to Ostia Antica

Lauren W Lauren Witter sits on the wall of the Janiculum hill.


Luke Chichester scales the steps of the amphitheater in the ancient Roman port of Ostia.


Dr. Connell points out details of murals at Ostia Antica. (This one was the painted sign for a fruit stand.)

A Student's View of St. Peter's Square

A Beggar and a Lemon Tree

Right now I'm sitting in a courtyard. Next to a lemon tree. Near a convent.

It is very windy, and we are near a hospital the nuns run. White sails billow through the trees, down and up from the building. Startling white. A young novice about fifteen paces from me is standing underneath a large wooden cross with a plaster corpus on it. Her presence is gentle. The sun is sitting warm on her face. Hands in her pockets, she stands still, looking up, looking up. I'm spying on her through my hair. I wonder what she is thinking. Suddenly sensing the Other, I glance over at the squat lemon tree near me and am startled to see a pair of fierce eyes in a dark, dark face, framed by a veil, staring at me suspiciously through the leaves. A nun is walking by. Staring as only an Italian can stare...

Yesterday, the girls and I went jewelry shopping at a street vender's. At Standa's, I bought a coconut, and then a gelato the size of a softball. Next we walked into a bread shop that smelled like fish. We - (OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS! A cat just screamed and I jumped clear out of my seat and half-way across the courtyard. I've never heart a cat scream before. That was the most soul-scraping noise ever.

It is silent now. The wind is tousling the leaves of the palm—black strokes against a blue sky—and the chill breeze is getting down my neck. A girl's laughter, muted from the height, is raining down gently from a hotel room above. It stopped. How can it be so quiet? I hear church bells.)

So we were in the little shop, and an unshaven and easy-going old man was weighing half a loaf of bread on a scale. “No, too small,” one of the girls was saying. “That one,” pointing through the glass. He drew out a loaf the length of her arm.

“You're eating all that?” I ejaculated.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It's not for me. It's for the old woman with the cup.” It seemed that, to her, the Old Woman with the Cup needed no other explanation. She just was.

Shivers ran through me. “May I come?”

“Sure, but I have to find her. I think I last saw her at the piazza. See, I met her before, gave money to her, then saw her the other day. But I didn't have any change on me, so I felt bad. She recognized me! I hope we can find her.”

But lo and behold, she was sitting right outside the bakery shop, crouched against the dingy wall. My friend put the bread into the woman's brown hands.

“Grazie,” she said. Who knows how old she was.... I want to describe her face, but I can't right now. It's not that I don't have the words, it is that, with my American inhibitions (“politeness”) and my instinctive feeling of awkwardness for her position, I didn't stare like an Italian. I can't remember her face. I can't even recall her eyes.

It's funny; they are not afraid to bore their eyes into you, even from across an almost-empty pizzeria; you feel their eyeballs slide tangibly down your nose and the curve of your cheek. It is rude in America to stare. There are definite personal spaces and we are aware of ours and other people's. We apologize even if we brush arms on the bus.

But now I wish I had been rude. I wish I had been beastly rude. I wish her face was burned into my mind. All that I can remember, oddly, was her tooth. It was large and rectangular and stuck out really far – yellowed, and with brown stains.

Moved by the woman's apparent plight and my friend's generosity, I dished out a two-Euro piece from my pocket and clinked it into her paper cup. Tears filled her eyes! This unhinged me; I was disconcerted. Could she cry on command? Whip up a batch of dramatic tears at the perfect moment? I don't care; I didn't care.

The weeping woman was trying to tell me something. “Cinque bambini, cinque bambini,” she wept.

“Aw,” I said, not understanding. She kept pointing to her tooth. I thought she was saying she would feed her five babies with my money. “Aw,” I repeated.

“Non, segnora,” she said persistently, pawing at my hand. “Cinque.”

I couldn't understand why she was delaying me. She smiled a little at my stupidity and held up five fingers. “Signora...” Then it dawned on me. She wanted more money!

Now I remember her eyes. They were absolutely nondescript. Maybe red-rimmed, perhaps darkish, dingy-gray – smallish? Her clothing? I can't remember the color. Maybe there was no color. Maybe you couldn't bore through her eyes to her soul. I wanted to say, “Show me your children. I want to wash them, feed them...” Maybe she was faker. Maybe her cup was empty because she sat on the coins already given to her. She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her shawl. Maybe she wasn't real. Maybe she would hide the loaf on her lap, under that shawl, so people would still have pity on her. There was such a mix of cynicism and pity in me, it was confusing and bothering.

I remember perfectly the nun's eyes in the lemon tree, even though I only saw them for 1.6 seconds. Fierce dark eyes set in white. Bushy thick brows wisped with gray. Flitting through green leaves, wide-eyed, angry near the pale lemons.

There was a five-Euro note in conveniently (or providentially?) in my pocket. Maybe she did have five children; maybe she didn't. But it was the “maybe she did” that made all the difference, that drowned the second, nixed my suspicions.

She took it and started sobbing. Her shoulders shook.

I didn't know if it was play-acting. Maybe she was pretending to shake her shoulders. I didn't care. I looked at her, and our hearts touched.

You know those instances, disturbing, exhilarating, when hearts touch? It stays with you forever, like the stubborn prickles I got today on my palm, from picking the purple fruit of a prickly pear.

Be it farce, I saw love in her. I was jolted by the knowledge that she loved me. And this was only by standing awkwardly in front of her. I wanted to physically touch her, but with my English inhibitions I didn't know how to make the move.

“Ciao! Deus – benedictus?” I said awkwardly, and turned to go, but she caught my hand.

“Gratzie, bella,” she said, reaching up her other hand and touching my cheek – cupping my cheek. The hand holding mine was dirty, warm, human. She was like Queequeg throwing his arm over Ishmael in bed.

She brought me down closer, as if she wanted to tell me something intimate.

“Me, Olga,” she confided, speaking slowly to the dumb American. She had not let go of my hand.

“Me, (my name).” She came close to pronouncing it.

“Si.”

Then I was brave and squeezed her hand before letting go. In fact, she held so tightly, so stickily, to my fingers, I almost had to pull a little away, like tweezing out the prickles from my palm.

She was not a plaster corpus, even if she didn't have the honest fierce stare of the lemon tree nun. She was human, even if I doubted her plight. And I think I remember her blank gray eyes, and love her.

--By a Thomas More College sophomore

Coming Home

Last Thursday in Rome I approached the throne of St. Peter and for the first time entered the Basilica built on his bones. I was blessed to make this visit not as a tourist or art student but as a penitent; I'd been procrastinating about going to see St. Peter's baroque enormity, wanting to visit the smaller churches first on the advice of a native--who warned that after St. Peter's the city's smaller temples might seem "anticlimactic." Since I'm to be here for three full months, I thought to wait at least until Holy Week. But the simple fact is I wanted to go to Confession, and the easiest places to find it in English are St. Peter's, or Santa Susanna--a parish run by the liberal Paulist Fathers. Santa Susanna certainly is beautiful, but there are some things that remind me uncomfortably... of home. The tabernacle is shunted off to a side chapel out of sight, while in its place stands a large, ugly modern throne to enshrine the celebrant. Despite all the rococo fixtures, the feel is distinctly suburban. At the exact spot where the Eucharist would normally reside in marble and gold, here stands a potted plant. In Orwell's honor, I can only hope it's an aspidistra.

Passionist nuns, just a little ahead of
Dr. Zmirak and Deirdre Roberts in line at St. Peter's.

The day started out at a much more humble spot, in the ancient Church of Santa Pudenziana, which holds the oldest Christian mosaic in Rome. Built on the house of the Roman senator whose daughter (Pudenzia) spent her youth collecting the butchered bodies of Christian martyrs to give them decent burial (her own head is reverently encased here in painted wax), the church is said to have once housed St. Peter himself. And tucked away in a side chapel one finds, beneath a modest sign announcing it, a marble altar on which St. Peter said his daily Mass. Elsewhere in the church lie the remains of a man whose relative once held St. Peter's heir a hostage: Lucien Louis Joseph Napoleon Cardinal Bonaparte. The great-grand-nephew of the little Emperor, the good Lucien served as a cardinal in Rome and took part in the First Vatican Council--which was forced to disperse when anti-clerical Piedmontese invaded. Ironically, it was only the defeat of Lucien's cousin, Louis Napoleon, in the Franco-Prussian War, that removed Rome's French defenders--and delivered her to the anti-clericals who promised to "unify Italy." (Natives tell me "We're still waiting....") The tangled skeins of history fray and lose their gold threads over time... until you stand before the grave of a forgotten Bonaparte in a dusty, half-forgotten church which is mainly used by Filipino migrants. All this, in a Roman senator's house.

St. Peter's square really does what all the art books promise: its colonnaded arms reach out to embrace the world. Once you pass through the brisk security lines, it's a jump from light into darkness. The eyes take time to adjust. It's impossible to take in one-tenth of the splendid artworks which reside here--the towering sculptures, the walls which hold not a single drop of paint, but are entirely made of colored mosaics, the baroque marbles depicting proud Counter-Reformation popes... and humble servants of the poor like Vincent de Paul. St. Helena, an Empress... and Juliana Falconieri, a blessedly neurasthenic nun who used to faint at the mention of sin. It makes perfect sense that this vast marble pile, heaped up with loving artistry in an age when papal authority was under challenge, and on the site where the first pope died, would expend much of its multicolored marble reasserting Peter's primacy. There are churches throughout the city which focus on other mysteries of the Faith that catechized Europe, on the Passion, the Resurrection, the suffering of the martyrs, or any of dozens of attributes or apparitions of Mary. That is not the point here, though. This building stands for many things, but first of all for this: The fact that Christ has not abandoned us. That the Truth we seek is not to be found in tiny shards between the lines of a biblical critics' crib of a butchered text, or even in the "inspired" heart poring over the Scriptures in his closet. We are not obliged to dig through the bone piles and fragmentary inscriptions of the Catacombs to find the "true" form of Christian life in an archaic reconstruction.

No, the Church is not a palimpsest, a puzzle, or even a proof. It's a battleship, scarred and marked with patchwork here and there, with rivets fallen from its sides and the bleak records of a number of criminal captains whose best efforts could not sink her. As Noah's ark must have, she sometimes reeks. (She's stuffed to the rafters with sinful beasts like me.) But there's nowhere else to spend our fleeting struggle with the sea. Far better to be a barnacle above the Ark's water line, than the tallest tower to sink beneath the waves.

As I wandered from the Blessed Sacrament chapel in search of the anglophone confessionals, I thought: "When was the last time I saw nearly this much marble?" And then I recalled: It was on my first visit to the U.S. Supreme Court, on January 22, 1979. Those steps, too, I'm glad to reflect, were crowded with Catholics.

After a brief, businesslike confession with an English speaking priest from China--I wonder how many martyrs he counts in his family--I made my way to the great Cambio statue of St. Peter. Tourists were reaching up to touch his foot for luck. I paused, and kissed his toe.