Book Recommendation: Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii A Day

Yeah, it's almost 11 and I'm still working. But that doesn't mean I can't recommend a kickass book.

This book was a happy accident - I ran into it yesterday while looking for the newest Richard K. Morgan novel, and it's title grabbed me. It's a history book about life in ancient Rome circa 200 AD, but it's written in the style of a Lonely Planet-like travel guide - complete with color pictures (well-done computer renders), maps, places to stay and sites to see. See if the first paragraph doesn't grab you:

All roads, they say, lead to Rome. But choose carefully which road to take, and just as importantly, when to take it. Go too early, and you will struggle against winter storms. Go too late, and all the festivals and spectacles will have finished, and everyone who can will have fled the summer heat to the seaside resort of Baiae, or the cool of the Tuscan hills. Really late arrivals will be jus tin time for the first damp of autumn - the unhealthiest time of year in an eternally unhealthy city.

And it just gets better from there. The style really grabbed me, because it does an excellent job of conveying what everyday life might have been like in terms that are easily accessible, especially to an audience not necessarily familiar with history books. It's also a really cool conceit: I'd love to do a series of role-playing sourcebooks in the same vein, similar to the Ravenloft Gazetteers or Castle Falkenstein.

But I digress. Check it out. Buy it from the link above and support this site. It's definitely worth a read.

Spain Part Three: Stepping Into History

The next day, we woke up, checked out, and hit the road (after buying a stack of maps at a bookstore - anyone who tells you "oh, you can drive through Spain with one general highway map" is a fucking liar.) Our first stop was the Mountain of Montserrat, not in the Caribbean but a little to the west of Barcelona. Montserrat is home to a mountaintop monastery - I looked for the ninja master who would teach me skills, but he was absent - and has been a pilgrimage destination for residents for more than a thousand years. And looking at the pictures, it's not hard to see why. The countryside is amazing, the views are spectacular, and the monks make a mean homemade cheese.

You can get to the top of the mountain in one of three ways: by a tour bus (we didn't have one), a train (the option we took), or something called a "funicular," which is basically like the Skyride at Cedar Point except at times you're dangling thousands of feet above the ground. I argue that "funicular" doesn't sound very fun at all. Now imagine that in a Lewis Black voice, and you have one of the recurring jokes from our trip. Ah, memories.

So once you're up there, it's a great spot to go hiking, which we did. There are all kinds of little shrines around the mountains for pilgrims to go to, so we chose the easiest and pooped out halfway through. We'd make pretty shitty pilgrims: we rode to the top of the mountain, and while we were wheezing (keep in mind, this was the top of a mountain and we're not exactly used to thin air here in Seattle) and resting, two old women passed us on their trip back from the shrine. It made us look bad.

We still didn't finish the walk.

But we did drive on to the city of Tarragona, originally inhabited by Iberians (the peninsula's "original" inhabitants kind of), and then a Roman capital. And then a medieval town, and then a site of a battle against Napoleon. A historical place, so to speak. The center of town is still very medieval and surrounded by Iberian then Roman then Medieval-era walls (basically the same wall rebuilt several times.) We ditched the car, got a hostel room, and walked around and enjoyed ourselves. Most of the town turned out for a Saturday dinner in the central square (no cars allowed), and it was certainly memorable just sitting and relaxing and taking it all in. And noisy, as we found out the party pretty much went until the wee hours of the morning.

Next day, up and at 'em to check out the ruins. Tarragona still has a fair amount of Roman ruins left (see the pictures) and is unique among cities I've visited: buildings literally "grow" out of the walls and ruins. At one point, the Roman wall ends at a house, and then continues beyond it. If we'd kept walking, we'd be in someone's backyard. It's hard to get that kind of history in the US, and it's one of my favorite things about Europe: simply being surrounded by something so ancient. To be able to touch a stone and know that it was placed by a builder thousands of years ago.

I've also been reading a lot of Roman history lately, and while it's one thing to read a book about a site, it's something totally different to stand there and see it for yourself. Simply visualizing how a town looked based on a book description isn't the same as looking at it for yourself; sure you can see it, but you can smell the stones and taste the dust on your teeth. I almost wanted to find the bathroom and break out the shit-sponge.

Almost.

But it was time to head for the coast, for a restful evening in small-town Spain before heading to Granada - home of the mighty Alhambra. It can be wonder of the world! Until next time!

Spain Part Two: Barcelona and Language

The Sagrada Familia is far enough away from the rest of Barcelona's sites that it's a pretty long walk - or a very short cab or bus ride away. Normally I'd be all in favor of walking, especially in Europe where cities are typically compact enough to make it worthwhile, but because we were so pressed for time we decided to take a cab. At least we got to see how someone who wasn't lost got through the city.

Cabs in Spain were fantastically cheap compared to nearly every other city I've been to. They're all sanctioned by the government, and they work exactly the same no matter where you are - the fares can vary slightly, but the "Libre/Occupido" indicator is always in the same place, so you never have to guess what combination of lights means a cab is empty or full. It's a kind of consistency I can appreciate. And they're also, as I mentioned, really cheap. Fares ran about 4-5 Euros. Certainly worth saving a couple of hours when you don't have much time.

The Sagrada Familia is technically a temple. Right now, it's not a functioning religious building because it hasn't been finished yet. Conceived by Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí as a symbol of the power of Christianity ("the last great sanctuary of Christendom" according to Wikipedia), when completed it will be taller than many cathedrals if not necessarily larger on the inside. As you can see in our pictures, work continues to this day - there were construction teams there when we toured the building.

The Sagrada Familia ("Sacred Family") will eventually have 12 towers, one for each apostle (it has 8 at the moment), 4 towers for each Evangelist, a tower for Mary, a tower for Joseph, and a massive center tower topped with a cross representing Jesus (here's a model of the final church.) The inside is currently pretty bare and many parts of the roof are still open, as the current construction projects are centered around strengthening the building to support the weight of the towers. Gaudí designed the building without the use of computers (obviously), but his original plans were destroyed in the 20s by anti-religious anarchists, so current architects have resorted to using computer-aided drafting to try to reconstruct Gaudí's plans.

The entire building, even unfinished, is one of the oddest and most beautiful religious structures I've ever seen. Its majesty is different from the medieval gothic cathedrals like Canterbury or renaissance cathedrals like St. Paul's. Gaudí used a unique architectural style that has been described as organic, and that's as good a word as any to encompass how the building feels. The curves on the facades and the towers remind me of stalagmites in a cave, or a giant building constructed by a race far less concerned with right angles than humans. The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of what I imagine some kind of odd Lovecraftian race might design if it suddenly got the notion to create a monument to Christianity.

Incidentally, if you ever find yourself in Barcelona with only a few hours to kill, I recommend the Sagrada Familia as the one thing you should certainly see.

After being awed by this unusual structure, we caught another (cheaper) cab to the top of Barcelona's main street, the Rambla. You don't necessarily have to speak Spanish to understand that a street called the Rambla is designed for, well, rambling - and that's exactly what it is. A wide pedestrian thoroughfare lined with booths (some selling the most unusual things I've ever seen in an outdoor market - rows of cages of pigeons being sold as pets. Pigeons: the winged garbage rats of the sky. That's just one example.) We introduced ourselves to the delights of sitting outside at 2 in the afternoon and eating a late lunch - every meal in Spain is late really - and then slowly rambling along afterwards.

It was somewhere around this time that I really began to be aware of being in a country where I understood very little of what was going on around me. Liz did an excellent job acting as an interpreter, but even when I was in Germany I at least had some kind of clue. Here, without Liz to tell me what was going on, I was utterly lost.

It's funny how much language is something that's taken for granted. It's how I imagine someone who's illiterate would feel in a library - surrounded by things that most certainly mean something and are trying to communicate, but unable to understand the message. It's how I feel when I'm in a modern art museum - I recognize that there is indeed an order to what's going on around me, there is something being communicated, but I'll be goddamned if I know what it is. I can honestly say that I never really freaked out about it, and Liz really tried to help when I felt especially lost. It's a hell of a thing being in a place where you can't understand what's going on. There's always pantomiming of course, and the old "point and grunt" interface, but you still feel lost and sometimes a little scared. How do you know you're not being taken advantage of, being the Gringo Turismo? It's enough to make or break a case of paranoia or OCD.

After our ramble down the Rambla, we hit Barcelona's gothic cathedral, which was everything the Sagrada Familia wasn't - traditional, big, open, and a bit of a disappointment. I love cathedrals - religious structures of all kinds hold a fascination for me, but the medieval structures that people built to create earthly sanctuaries for their faith are unique in many ways - the design of them in a time when most people were living in tiny hovels, the epic scale so much larger than anything else around them, the investment of time where those who began a project knew it would be finished by their grandchildren's grandchildren. It takes a certain degree of faith to even dream of such a thing, and it's even more compelling when you see how many of these structures there are all over Western Europe.

But this one still felt bland. It was something I'd seen before. In fact, I felt that about most of the cathedrals we saw on our trip - large gothic churches. None of them held the magic or awe of my first trip to Canterbury in 1999, when I walked in and the organ was going and the boy's choir was singing and I was literally reduced in size and stature by a building and its activities (OK, I ended up getting teary-eyed and had to kneel. Maybe it's a Catholic response.) But that never happened here.

In fact, the archaeological museum right behind the Cathedral was more interesting. After touring some Roman-era artifacts, it takes you into the basement where you quite literally walk through the excavation of several blocks of the old Roman town, from the walls to a fish oil factory (yum!) to a winery to houses, and a Visigothic-era church and palace. It was my first tangible experience with the vast ancient history of Spain, and it was the perfect setup for the next stage of our trip: driving into the countryside, stopping at Tarragona (an old Roman capital and port city), and seeing the kinds of ruins I'd only read about in books.

How's that for a setup for next time?