(Click on the photos for a larger view.)
Rome. One of the hardest places to photograph without the trappings of cliché.
You just don’t go there as a photographer and not take a time-lapse shot of the Coliseum at dusk. That would be like visiting Capri and not wearing all-white linen pants. The Coliseum begs to be photographed because it is the easiest juxtaposition — ancient, crumbling Thunderdome and modern, fast-paced headlights. Enter “coliseum” into any stock photo search engine and 50% of the results will be this beauty at night. So, on our first night in Rome I was one of five dudes with a tripod on the sidewalk. No matter. Photoshelter took the shots anyway.
You also don’t go there without snapping a shot of a sunbeam passing through the Pantheon’s oculus.
And you don’t go there and avoid bleeding money, as this store near the Spanish Steps so delicately reminded us:
Finally, you don’t go there and forego the urge to see everything and look like this at the end of the day:
So Day 1 wasn’t so much about pursuing the wholly original photograph of Rome (though the Berlusconi couple was pretty unique and perfect). It was about seeing the quintessentials. Armed with a hard-bound Roman history text book written in Italian, my cousin Nick showed us around the ancient quarter and filled us in on what we were seeing: Chiesa del Gesú (home of the Jesuit Order), Santa Maria Sopra Minera (home of the Dominican Order), the Pantheon (home of the ever-so-awesome-sounding oculus), San Ivo (a weird, beehive chapel hidden a courtyard) and Piazza Navona (home to 80,000 tourists eating spaghetti from the tourist menu).
Some 10 years my senior, Nick and his brother Joe were the cousins my brother and I always wanted to play with as kids. Kind of a natural thing for young boys to look up to the older boys. But here we were, peers at last, finding an authentic pizzeria with no-nonsense Pizza Ladies (think Brooklyn attitude only in Italian) and gorging on perfect slices made by an Ecuadorian pizza chef. To quote Nick, “all the best pizza chefs in Rome are Latin American for some reason.” Then we wandered around the perimeter of the Vatican to a specific gelato haunt that Nick was fond of. Five burly, hairy-armed dudes with white paper hats and 8 varieties of gelato. I went with 2 scoops of pine nut, and as I slowly savored every delicious calorie, the three of us watched the Roman police move in to scatter a dozen North African counterfeitters in a fruitless show of authority. Now I was starting to get fascinated. Cities are only worth your valuable vacation time if they can reveal the utterly unexpected, and as the afternoon went on, that’s what we found.
Our second day in Rome was simple. We found Campo dei Fiori, an outstanding local market wedged in a nondescript piazza, and that was all we needed for a highlight. Now Rome was really enchanting me. The colors, the flavors, the smells, the characters….
The old man pictured above was selling a “10-in-1″ kitchen tool that really only does five things. It slices, it dices, it peels, it scales and it blows bubbles. He was a sly salesman: eleven days into the trip and we finally bought our first souvenir. The exchange rate had everything to do with that.
There were also everyday life scenes such as this one:
I guess there is a good reason why Anthony Bourdain heads to the market at the start of his shows. That’s where the pulse is.
After Rome, it was back into a rental car and off to the hills up north: Umbria. More on that later…
