Rome: The Actual Footprints of Jesus!

Lauren enjoys riding bicycles, and I am experienced in this modest elective*, so we thought it would be diverting to join a tourist’s riding group around Rome.

“They’re e-bikes,” she mentioned, looking at their page the night before. 

“Isn’t the theme of this whole town that civilizations collapse?” I replied. 

“And there’s a picnic lunch.”

“If we can’t even pedal bicycles any more, our destiny is to become marshmallow bycatch when the Russians seize our arable soil.” 

“We need to be there at nine.”

“I’ll pedal the damn thing,” I thought to myself. “I don’t need any help riding a bike.” 

Our fit and peppy guide, Adriano, worked two days a week as the tour’s guide, two days a week as “computer I.T. man,” and weekends as a pizzaiolo. He liked having variety in his life, he said. His unyoked annular suggested this third of his employment calendar served double-duty as a practical trawl for the type of variety that comes in spandex, and the abundant wine and limoncello at the picnic further underwrote this suspicion. “Cyclists,” I muttered to myself. “They think everything should be an orgy.” 

Soaring down the roads of Rome on a bicycle was, truth be told, infinitely preferable to clop-clopping my depleted soles down miles of unevenly-laid cobblestones. Even when it came time to climb the long hill to the catacombs, and I refused on principle to engage the electric boost, I still felt a freedom — a very different, more native relationship with this host country. We’re used to seeing our built environments at speed, and they’re scaled for that; walking everywhere frustrates the unconscious awareness that we are in a vast new place, as it realizes we’re going to miss most of it. Walking a city is of course an essential tourist experience, but only walking it…imagine if, instead of sheet music, a clerk with a small, velvet-lined box brought each new note to the pianist, opened it ceremoniously, and then closed it once the note had been played. That is the experience of walking a city. To pass through it quickly is to unlock its greater rhythm.**    

Adriano circled back to me, as I had fallen far behind the group, whose large lazy bottoms were nearly out of sight by this point. He looked concerned for a moment, then motioned to the “on” switch for the electric drive. Aware that I can come across like a grumpy asshole, I briefly inhabited my more glorious self, gave him a thumbs-up, and flipped a switch that made a large blue light glow. Soon I was shooting up the hill like a peasant with his leg caught in a carrot-pulling machine.  

The ancient Christians excavated over 400 miles of underground tunnels in which to entomb the bodies of their deceased, despite the highly efficacious (and far less stinky) Roman system of burning them. This institutionalized maladaptation to clutter the town with liquefying meat has led us, through approximately eighty generations of pathologization, to modern-day children being forced to sit and watch Hoarders and Storage Wars in the warren of their grandparents’ homes. If you want to get annoyed at all the foolhardy things Christians have given us on the strength of one goofy claim or another, Rome is your place.  

Our guide at the catacombs, a jocular Indian man — who turned combative when certain practically-minded American guests asked polite, carefully-worded clarifying questions about the nature of odor in the tombs — spoke several times of a martyred Christian woman whose faith was so strong that her body still has not decomposed, eighteen centuries later. He’d seen it, because he had the right credentials***, but it was not something just anybody could go and see. Much like Bigfoot or the Canadian girlfriend, I smelled a rat.

We had a remarkably competent cappuccino from the little cart by the catacombs gift shop, then scooted off down the Appian Way. At points, the Way has eroded into a base layer of stones the size of pillowcases, which makes for some world-class bonch-rattling. I rode at the front of the group, so I would not be haunted by the sight of all of the large bottoms flopping and flaring in agitation.  

As we rattled our weary bonches slowly through the countryside, we passed the ruins of ancient aqueducts, crumbling stone farmhouses, and little parks full of exuberant preschoolers whose chatter, under that bright and purifying autumn sun, was the swirling of leaves into burbling creeks. If Dali ever painted a page-a-day calendar evaporating into the waters of Avalon, this was it. Cycling was growing on me.

Soon we parked our bicycles at a clearing with benches, where we were met by a friendly young woman, known to Adriano, who had, in her hip outfit of parachute pants and puffy white sneakers the size of cinderblocks, set out a simple table of bread spread with ricotta, tomatoes, cured meats, and olive oil. There were olives, grapes, a light lemon cake, and Adriano’s aforementioned firkins of iniquity. The other people on our tour — a goofy Australian family, a Dutch family who spoke every language under the sun and cycled at great speed one millimeter apart from each other, and an older Italian couple — ate with decidedly un-American reserve, while I, once the others had signaled their fill, happily went into seconds and thirds. An Italian, presenting this simple Italian repast, in Italy, gave me all the permission I needed to completely accept the elegance of this unadorned style of eating. I also felt it important to comfort the others by satisfying their stereotype of American dining habits.    

The smallish church we saw next, which was apparently famous because Paul the Baptist had given a speech there once, also had a square of marble on the floor — protected by iron grates — with the “actual footprints of Jesus” in it. This might have sold better if the material in question had been wet clay at some point, but who am I to design Rome. Frankly, this whole sacred business was really starting to remind me, in a wearying way, of all the dumb shit I’d had to swallow during Sunday school. (I apologize for the disintegration of my language here. I’ve just been around too long to find further succor in unsubstantiated supernatural nonsense.)

After the tour, we felt obligated to go see St. Peter’s Basilica, which is an extremely large church. The biggest in the world, according to our friends at Google. You could fit the entire NFL inside, and still have room for hot air balloons and the music of Chris Stapleton. To walk up to its ostentatious plaza and colonnades — with their massive, action-stanced statuary of sainted mortals — is to be immediately reminded of Las Vegas, another place I find gross. WWJD if presented with this leviathan spectacle of the church’s self-congratulatory bloat?

It had been gradually dawning upon me that this significant accelerator of the religion that has shaped our western worldview had once just been rocks and paths and blue sky like anywhere, where dudes in tunics ate eel soup from a pot and shat through a hole in a board. They tried little schemes until one found traction, then that one got a brick building, and then a bigger one, and then who was any simple hole-shitting grain-sifter to question the thing that was so important it had a really, truly big brick building, full of guys in secret hats, devoted to it. Then the brick building just kept getting bigger and bigger, until it was St. Peter’s, at which point it had truly exceeded the scale at which the average human can comprehend and cast doubt. Traveling to Rome was one of the more valuable bits of debunking that I’ve done in my life.   

At this point, weary of ancient wonders, and (as Americans) more than familiar with the icky feeling of outsized propaganda, we softly cried uncle, and agreed that a taxi back to the apartment was the only suitable salve for our souls. As we withdrew from the Basilica property and its swarm of tat-hawkers, hat-peddlers, and pushy men selling USB batteries on lanyards, I sensed the dénouement of my relationship with the Catholic wonders of Rome. A young priest, ministering pointlessly to a mumbling addict in an underpass, was my last memory of Vatican City.  

Next time in Rome: Watching Buena Vista Social Club on mushrooms.

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* I will allow that cycling can be pleasurable, but I consider running to be the superior physical measure, as (a) there is no cowardly mechanical advantage, and (b) one’s bottom does not grow comically broad like that of the Hippopotamidae. 

** Please enjoy the film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Walther Ruttmann, 1927.   

*** An amulet made of compressed bullshit.