Tag Archives: Rome

Faces As Memorable As Places

by Woody

Words fail me, and colossally so, in trying to describe seeing the Colosseum in Rome in person.

Since it is one of the iconic Seven Wonders of the World, here are seven adjectives to begin: spectacular, amazing, awe-inspiring, astonishing, breathtaking, magnificent, wondrous.

Meanwhile, seven full entries from a thesaurus cannot do justice to the La Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. Designed by Antonio Gaudi, the towering cathedral is truly the most spectacular-amazing-awe-inspiring-astonishing-breathtaking-magnificent-wondrous building, outside and in, I have ever set eyes upon.

La Sangrada Familia from the outside…

To borrow Hollywood’s practice of pitching a new script by combining two known movies, La Sagrada Familia is Dr. Seuss’s imaginative drawings meet John Muir’s love of giant redwoods. Indeed, just as Muir believed nature was a church, Gaudi felt nature should be in a church and thus designed the interior marble columns to resemble a petrified forest of soaring trees.

As unforgettable as La Sangrada Familia and the Colosseum both are, two small scenes nearby will also long remain in my memory.

Leaving the Colosseum, my wife, who is half-Italian, and I squeezed onto a bench seat in the back of a hop-on hop-off bus. Lisa was next to the window and I was beside a young Italian boy, age 9 or 10, who was with his parents. Naturally, the boy was connected to his iPhone via earbuds.

Meanwhile, Lisa plugged the cord of her solo earbud into a console that provided sightseeing commentary in different languages. As she searched for English without success, the boy turned and said a number in Italian – cinque, I believe it was, which we translated to cinco in Spanish – and indeed channel five made Lisa flash a smile of thanks.

… and a breathtaking inside view.

My console, or perhaps my cheap disposable earbud provided by the tour, was broken as every channel came up empty. Content to view the beautiful city in silence, I suddenly felt a tap on my shoulder and the boy offered me one of his two earbuds.

Instead of sightseeing commentary, I was greeted with music. Italian pop, I presume it was, but understanding the lyrics did not matter for the boy’s act of kindness required no translation. For the next 10 minutes or so, we bobbed heads in unison and had a wordless conversation as he pointed at various sights.

“Ciao,” the boy said when his family’s exit came.

“Grazie,” I replied, handing back the borrowed earbud.

A few days later in Barcelona, Lisa and I were enjoying a lunch of tapas and sangria at an outdoor café overlooking a tree-lined grand plaza. Fortunately, our table for two was under a canopy because out of the blue, literally from a blue sky, it began raining fairly hard.

A rainbow soon appeared, not in the sky but on the walkway across the plaza from where we sat. A young man, who I guessed to be in his late teens, was walking with an elderly woman, who I guessed to be his grandmother. She shuffled slowly, holding his arm for balance, and I imagined he was escorting her home.

When the unexpected showers arrived, the grandson quickly removed his long-sleeved flannel shirt and held it over his grandmother’s grey-haired bun and stooped shoulders and continued patiently walking at her unhurried pace despite getting soaked in his T-shirt. I wish you could have seen this love in the rain that was every bit as lovely as La Sagrada Familia was in sunshine the day before.

Once again, the magic of traveling was found as much in faces as in places.

Onward in next week’s column to the French Riviera…

Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive: You can still drop off new sports balls or have online orders shipped to: Jensen Design & Survey, 1672 Donlon St., Ventura CA 93003. And please be sure to email me at woodywriter@gmail.com about your gift so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally and thank you in an upcoming column.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Moved To Tears By Girl In Pompeii

by Woody

“We do not take a trip,” John Steinbeck wrote in his 1962 gem, Travels with Charley: In Search of America, “a trip take us.”

In 2022, in search of the Pompeii ruins in Italy during my Travels with Lisa, our 40th wedding anniversary trip took us to tears.

To learn that an estimated 2,000 inhabitants of this ancient city died in less than 15 minutes after Mount Vesuvius, less than 15 miles away, erupted two millennia ago is overwhelming. Indeed, imagining the horror of noon on August 11, 79 A.D. brings to mind the nightmare morning of September 11, 2001.

Strolling the cobblestone streets and alleyways, ducking into living quarters and brothels, seeing the basilica and amphitheatre and the massive main city square with a colossal statue of a centaur warrior, all brought on a sense of wonder.

A narrow alleyway in the ancient ruins of Pompeii.

And yet it was a single room, small and simple, that brought on misty eyes. Here, one story represented every story on that calamitous day. Here, in a sarcophagus-like glass box, was a plaster casting of one of the exhumed victims. Here was a 14-year-old girl.

She died lying prone, forehead resting on her right forearm and left hand covering her nose and mouth, as though she were pleasantly sunbathing on a beach while shielding her eyes from the summer sun and face from wind-blown sand. In truth, she was trying to protect herself from the aerial tsunami of falling ash and swirling gasses that suffocated the residents of Pompeii – in the streets, in their homes, in their beds – long before the molten waves of lava arrived.

A steady line of tourists, hushed and solemn in expression, filed past the plaster girl with many snapping photographs as if this were merely an art sculpture imitating life – or, in this case, death.

The following day, 150 miles to the north in Rome, the Pompeiian girl seemed to reappear on the beautiful Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II pedestrian bridge spanning the Tibre River and connecting the historic city centre with the Vatican. Midway across, and also centered widthwise, was a life-sized sculpture. Instead of white plaster, it was cast iron and grey; instead of a girl in her home, it was a homeless man lying in a similar prone position with his forehead pillowed on a forearm. Again, tourists took pause to reflect in thought and take pictures.

The amphitheatre with a stage of white marble.

Shortly past the end of the triple-arched stone bridge, less than a half-mile walk from St. Peter’s Basilica where the poor are daily blessed, was a third figure in a nearly identical pose as the ancient girl of plaster and the man of iron. But this was a real person, a man, in his fifties perhaps, lying on the sidewalk with his head turned to the side as if taking a swimmer’s breath, a raggedy blanket pulled up to his scraggy-bearded chin.

For all the attention given to the sculpture of a homeless man on the nearby landmark bridge; for all the reverence paid to the Pompeiian girl who died in a famous disaster long, long, long ago; the opposite was now the norm. The person still drawing breath seemed to draw only blind eyes, not empathy.

Homelessness is everydayness in most cities worldwide, yet the manner in which passerby’s collectively sidestepped and averted their eyes from a living person whereas they visually embraced a plaster girl and a cast-iron man, this juxtaposition was as silently heartbreaking as a thunderous Vesuvius eruption.

To be continued, more happily, in Rome in two weeks after the kickoff of Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive next week…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Vacation Photos – Less Can Be More

by Woody

Third try was indeed the charm.

After twice having a dream vacation canceled by the coronavirus nightmare, my better-half, who is half-Italian, and I finally made it to the land where her family roots reach deep into the fertile soil. Specifically, we sailed fully around the thigh-high boot setting out at Venice, through the narrow Strait of Messina at the toe, up the western coast and over to Barcelona with nine port stops en route.

The starting and ending bookends proved to be our favorites, although perhaps this was partly because we spent extra nights in both and were thus able to explore them a little more fully than the daytime destinations.

The ancient Colosseum in Rome was definitely photograph worthy!

A cruise, in my view, is sort of like speed dating in that you learn who (or where) you want to get to know better. In this case, we didn’t ask Croatia and Albania for their phone numbers. Don’t get me wrong, the former’s Old Town Dubrovnik – with white marble streets and forts of stone so magnificent “Game of Thrones” filmed myriad scenes there – was memorable, yet an afternoon inside these historic walls was plenty. Similarly, a few hours sufficed at the ancient sites of the Olympics in Olympia, Greece, and the Pompeii ruins near Naples, Italy.

Our two ports in France – Villefranche-sur-Mer and Toulon – are both gorgeous coastal locales, but to be honest we much prefer Ventura’s similar charms so feel no strong gravitational pull to return. Rome and Florence, however, like Venice and Barcelona, already beckon us back for longer sojourns.

In the coming weeks, I will share here some snapshots-in-words of my favorite experiences from our two-week trip: from memorable people and meals to the canals of Venice to the Colosseum in Rome to the breathtaking La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, and more.

Speaking of snapshots, my cell phone camera kept freezing with the command: “Out of Storage. Free Up Space.” Just my luck…

…good luck, that is.

In these old lands I was forced to go old-school. Instead of mindlessly snap-snap-snapping endless digital photos, I was forced to point-and-shoot judiciously. It was like going back in time and using a camera with film that comes in 12, 24 or 36 exposures. Instead of paying to have prints made, I had to spend time deleting files.

So it was I found myself taking in the sites, and sights, in their full grandeur through naked eyes instead of miniaturized on a pixel screen. Thus, I found myself absorbing the scenes and memorizing the moments before selectively choosing the very best ones to photograph.

In this reframed frame of mind, it saddened me to see so many others touring these goosebump-inducing historic places, even a museum filled with Picasso artwork, while largely squinting at their tiny cameras. They seemed more concerned with reliving these experiences in the future rather than living them in the present. One romantic couple we encountered seemed to be experiencing their entire gondola ride through the canals of Venice digitally instead of actually.

Conversely, instead of hundreds of photos, so many as to be overwhelming, I came home with only a few “rolls” of selectively snapped images to be developed at Fotomat, so to speak. This was a silver lining, as mentioned, for it seems to me that too many pictures is like not being able to see the forest for the trees. Indeed, the graceful stone columns in La Sagrada Familia are meant to invoke towering trees, a forest of them, something one might miss if looking through a camera lens.

To be continued next week…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com