Last summer I traveled with a group of people from my town on a tour of Italy. We went in early July and roamed about for three weeks. Hot! (I refer to the weather.) We started the journey with three days in Rome. Who would have expected streets lined with huge sycamore trees splashing deep shade over many of the outdoor tables around the trattorias?!

We spent our first Roman morning in the Vatican. Even hotter, and humid! The famous Sistine Chapel was so crowded that, when a woman fainted, she didn't have room even to fall to the floor; there were that many people crammed into the place.

I went to the Sistine Chapel thinking I would have a great feeling of spiritual grace, in this hall with its vast Michelangelo ceiling and enormous altar painting. No. Instead, I felt suffocated. Now and then, when tourists got talking too much, a security guard would boom out: "Silenzio! Silenzio!" We would have a quiet moment and then the noise built up again.

Actually I thought the Vatican was all about Christian history. In fact, it's about popes. Their names are everywhere, and the popes were apparently judged by how much money they could spend to add new sculptures, tapestries, art works of every kind, to the palace.

Long, long ago, I was a high-school student of Latin. Many people complain about how crowded Rome is, and how dense the traffic gets (unspeakably dense). It's true, but the drive to "old" Rome is worth any number of traffic jams. The Roman ruins are spectacular, and I was thrilled (what other word can I use?) to walk on a real Roman road, see ancient aqueducts, broken up in spots, but still running across the city, and admire walls and great arches made of the traditional narrow Roman bricks.

The Coliseum, though crumbled down to partial walls, is still impressive. As Walt Kelly's Pogo said, "if you squeam your eyes" you can almost imagine crowds of cheering Romans. Circus Maximus, on the other hand, was startling in its smallness. Remember the chariot race in the movie "Ben Hur?" This Circus, or circle, is where that race was said to happen. Today the circus is a weedy field with a dirt trail going around it: a dry, dusty path for joggers. As everyone learns in Latin class, sic transit gloria mundi ("so passes the glory of the world")!

In the next article in this series, I'll take a visit to the fascinating Catacombs outside Rome.

For now, ciao!