Just Got Back From Rome . . .

Sunday, May 10

(This is the first in a series of blogs I'll be posting on my Rome trip, and about the fascinating Xylitol Conference that I attended there.)

Just got back from Rome. The trip was organized by the people at Xlear (pronounced "Clear"), makers of xylitol products (more on that in a subsequent blog).

We got into Rome, and our guide, Iris, met us at the hotel to take us on an introductory tour of the old city. Iris Carulli is an American expat who now lives in Italy and conducts tours. She's a friend of former WOR Food Talk host, Arthur Schwartz.

The first thing that hits you about Rome is the traffic--mad streams of mostly tiny little cars, and ever-present scooters, darting wildly about. Rome is organized chaos, things get done eventually, but it seems like mayhem much of the time.

The other thing that strikes you is that Rome is a superimposition of many different ages at once: Ancient churches loom everywhere--Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque; columns of ancient Roman temples seem to come out at you out of nowhere.

A building built in the 1800s is conspicuously new. There are virtually no skyscrapers in the center city. The Romans take it for granted that they inhabit a vast archaeological site. Now I know why they call it the Eternal City.

Rome provides us Americans with an interesting perspective because their world pre-eminence lasted for around seven or eight hundred years. Their empire comprised the entire known world stretching from England to Spain to North Africa, the Middle East, much of Europe, Turkey, and beyond. They had an incredibly sophisticated civilization that enabled them to build huge buildings that remain standing today without using computers or telecommunications or internal combustion.

Then, an interesting thing happened: Their knowledge was lost during the Dark Ages, and the average Roman of that time trudged around the ruined columns of half-buried, plundered temples as if these were the remains of a vanished, alien civilization. Artists even lost the ability to capture perspective, a technique not recovered until the Renaissance, which was a true rebirth. A cautionary tale--could it happen here?

Large parts of the ruins of ancient Rome were "rediscovered" by the classicists of the 16th and 17th centuries, who in effect, recaptured a sense of history and the possibility of progress after a period of chaos, warfare, and stagnation. Learned about this in school, but I needed to come to Rome to really "get" it.

Meanwhile, as the gilded splendor of Rome was being built, and fabulous masterpieces were being sculpted and painted, our rough-clad ancestors were carving out a meager existence in an inhospitable wilderness in the New World. Makes you think, doesn't it?

All the while, I was reading a Roman historical fiction "potboiler" novel called The Forgotten Legion, by Ben Kane. It proved the perfect accompaniment to the trip, with its graphic depiction of life in ancient Rome, and gory descriptions of gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum.

More on the Rome trip and the Xylitol Conference in upcoming blogs--check back frequently for updates!