Now that was a surprise.

After yesterday’s frustrations, today we decided to hire a guide. I was taken aback by the price, but when’s the next time I’ll be in Rome? Possibly never!

Back in ’72, which is a great Bob Seger album unavailable on streaming services, you flew to Europe for $200, bought a Eurail pass and the goal was to spend as little as possible, to come home with money, and that was a mistake. When you’re confronted with an entrance fee, any fee at all in a foreign country, and you desire to partake, pay, you’ll regret it if you don’t, when you’re home.

So we said yes.

And walked down to the lobby this morning to find a little old man and a driver and from the moment we pulled away from the curb this little old man with the vigor of someone decades younger started to speak. And he didn’t stop speaking until we were dropped off three hours later.

Giancarlo started with facts and figures, the number of palaces, the number of churches, while telling us the layout of the city is the same as two thousand years ago, it’s the same buildings, redone.

One palace had two thousand rooms, that’s where the Pope used to live, before the Vatican.

And I’m positively riveted. Paying attention. This is the learning experience I didn’t get in college.

Then I thought about it… The college teachers were pedigreed with a degree, there were no teaching assistants where I went to school, the professors had their doctorates and they couldn’t have been more boring. But Giancarlo?!

That’s why I became an art history major. Because the teachers were all good, it was a pleasure to go to class. I remember Art 101, which I only took as a sophomore because everybody recommended it, John Hunisak showed us some slide and said there was a great ice cream place around the corner… In art history you could think for yourself, do your own analysis, whereas in the English department it was all about someone else’s theories, too much was set in stone instead of being vibrant and alive like in art.

Giancarlo is telling us how Napoleon was Italian. And then the French took over Corsica… And after becoming emperor, Napoleon built a palace for his mother and brother in Rome, with a veranda where she could look down on the hoi polloi, unseen. It’s still there!

And then city hall, redone by Michelangelo… The walkway is built of stones ripped-off from the Coliseum.

Our ultimate destination was the Catacombs, since we’d been to the usual tourist sites on previous visits to the city.

So what you had was the pagans. They thought life ended with death. Done, gone. So to preserve your memory, they created a sculpture of you and posted it on the Appian Way. There are thirty thousand of these sculptures in the Vatican Museum.

But the Christians were persecuted, at least until Constantine conquered Rome in the fourth century, and they believed you never really died, you went to heaven, hell or purgatory. So, you “rested in peace” until this happened.

So because of this persecution, the Christians buried their dead underground, they dug into soft volcanic rock, made a hole big enough for a wrapped body, and then put a marble plaque over the whole thing to signify who was there. If you were a martyr, you were buried under an arch. There are four levels and forty seven miles of paths and this is not the only catacombs. Giancarlo told us we’d see no skulls, but there might be some bones. And he reached into one of the graves and pulled out a humerus or something and it was absolutely creepy. And he pulled out a fragment of a ceramic jug. And he’d sift his hand through the dirt for bone fragments… I thought in a museum you looked but did not touch, but I guess there are so many graves…

And they had these carved out spots where they put these little pots of deodorant. It smelled like hell down there back in the day.

So when we came back above ground, we had to get Giancarlo’s story. Turns out he has a Ph.D. And taught not only in Italy, but at Penn State and the University of Phoenix. If only I had a professor like this…

And from there we went to the Appian Way, which for years I thought was just a home pizza kit. And on each side of the Appian Way are these giant tombs, like houses. And the road goes on for seven hundred kilometers, and it used to be smooth before they ripped up the paving stones to lay modern utilities and just put the stones back willy-nilly. Giancarlo kept on telling us that back in the day they had what we do now, newspapers… Until the Mongols came along and wiped everybody out with the plague they carried.

It was mind-blowing, I didn’t want it to end.

And then I thought of my mother going to Elderhostel, now known as “Road Scholar.” Yes, old people go to some far-flung place and learn.

And I thought of how life was the same at the beginning and the end. In the beginning you know nothing and go to school to learn. And when you get out of school you think you know everything. But when you get old and retire you realize all you don’t know, you’re fascinated by history, imagination, you contemplate how much you’ll never know, never experience.

Made me want to go back to every city and hire a guide, but I’m not rich enough to do that. When I was in Rome half a century ago, it was like my art history courses come alive. But Giancarlo filled in the details between the paintings and sculpture. Furthermore, you could tell he enjoyed doing this, it just wasn’t a gig.

He’s eighty four, although he has the vim and vigor of someone much younger. And a girlfriend in Dublin who he owns a house with who is dying of brain cancer after their twenty years together, her sisters don’t want him to visit her in the hospital for fear he’ll convince her to give him all her money. And he’s got a son. And he keeps pushing the envelope.

I hate to tell you this, but life has no meaning, it is what you make of it. No one is keeping score, and I’m down with the pagans, there is no afterlife. So you have to gain your own perspective.

In school they tell you what to do, how to behave. And the freedom of graduating feels so liberating. But then you get older and there’s no structure, no one telling you what to do, no scorecard that applies to all.

Some just put one foot in front of another at a job, whether it be digging ditches or being a doctor. Others lament that they didn’t pay more attention in school for a better adulthood. And some have families, but eventually even the children grow up and have children of their own. So what do you do?

That’s the big question in life, what do you do?

Ultimately it’s your decision, even though you might feel parental or societal pressure. It’s tough to go your own way. Even worse, when people truly have freedom, they’re so often paralyzed.

And you can’t do everything, and a lot of times we can only do the same thing, Giancarlo told us he took Bill Gates and his family on a tour of the Vatican… I can go on that tour too, and so can you!

But deeper…

Most people live in a bubble, because to contemplate what is going on outside it is too overwhelming. That’s what being in Rome is like, overwhelming. There’s so much to learn, so much to see. And you realize the people two millenniums ago were really no different from us. Which is hard to fathom.

So I learned plenty today, it was utterly fascinating. Will there be a test, will I get a gold star? Absolutely not. I’ve got to get off on it for itself.

And I did.

Giancarlo Alú: https://shorturl.at/tM056