A week to go

Sheila and I haven't really started preparing for the trip. Physically preparing, that is: figuring out what we're going to bring, packing, getting the mail stopped, do we have a tiny toothpaste tube, where did we put the passports, how are we going to get to Boston, who'll feed the cat, will the cat even notice we're gone... etc.

Most of our pre-work has been reading guides, boning up on Italian, and checking out where things are on Google Earth, deciding whether or not to buy museum tickets online or when we get there. (How did people travel before the internet? How did we do anything before the internet?)

One thing: Sheila got a Kindle for her birthday, which will save lugging half a dozen books to read on the plane and in Italy. Still, we'll need to bring along the guide books, which for some perverse reason seem to be heavier than other books of comparable size.

I look forward to seeing Ostia Antica again. Ostia was the old port of Rome some ten/fifteen miles down the river. Like Pompeii it's a large tract of ruins. Not as well preserved as Pompeii but not as touristy or ghoulish either. It's like the bones of a real place where ordinary life happened--no volcanoes.  As you walk around the abandoned streets you can almost sense what was happening there 2000 years ago.

A street in Ostia

In surprising ways life then wasn't much different from what we know today, especially in cities. On one street in Pompeii, for example, there was a fast food restaurant every few hundred feet. Food was kept warm in sunken crocks on counters at the front end of the shop. Drive-in (or rather walk-by) style, you paid your denarius or whatever and got a bowl of stuff ladled out of the crock and ate it right there on the sidewalk.