Since its construction, the building and/or the great dome have been destroyed or damaged almost once a century by fires, earthquakes, or riots. When it was rebuilt in 562, Paul the Silentiary composed an epic poem in which he described the church as a meadow of marble. Paul the Silentiary, by the way, was responsible for maintaining the silence in the palace of Emperor Justinian. (“I hate a babbling tongue,” he wrote in an amatory verse from the Greek Anthology.)
Enrico Dandolo, one of the doges of Venice, is buried in Hagia Sophia. In 1204, he led the Fourth Crusade, which defeated Constantinople and sacked the city. At the time he led the knights to victory, he was blind and believed to be ninety-seven years of age!
Following the Fourth Crusade, numerous important relics and art were removed from Hagia Sophia and other sites in Constantinople. These included the shroud of Jesus and a stone from his tomb, the Virgin Mary’s breast milk, the statues that would become the four horses of Saint Mark in Venice, a trace of the blood of Christ, a piece of the true cross, the arm of St. James the Apostle, and “a not inconsiderable piece of St. John.”
The day before we leave, we begin to hunger for some “real” North American food and hike up to the Hilton Hotel on a high hill for a splurge on hamburgers and a wash in the clean bathrooms with hot running water. In the end, we will pay dearly for this last-minute indulgence.
The next day we go to the bank, change our money, receive our official declaration of exchange and buy our last-class train tickets to Venice, where we will have to leave the Orient Express and switch to the Italian train line. We have a minimal amount of money left between the three of us and we know we will still need to buy tickets from Venice to Rome.
When we go shopping for food to take on the train, we decide we can only afford a couple loaves of bread and a two-pound hunk of white cheese, semi-soft, that we later discover stinks worse than Limburger. The powerful, rank smell means we will be assured of having few travellers with the gumption to share our accommodations on the long train journey home. We hop the train, find a compartment, and bid farewell to fabled Istanbul, gateway to the Orient. Little do we realize we have a fifty-three-hour train trip ahead of us to reach Venice. Our compartment is fitted with wooden benches only, and we are carrying enough food to last three grown men about half a day.
Fifty-three hours. As the crow flies, Istanbul to Venice is about nine hundred miles. Of course, a train isn’t a crow, but if it flew as straight as one, this train would have kept up a blistering pace of seventeen miles per hour for the entire journey. As it was, it could not have travelled much faster than that. By the second day, we are delirious with hunger and the slowly passing view of snow-covered Bulgarian and Yugoslavian fields out the window.
About forty hours into the journey, we three starving students stare at a massive, well-fed Austrian who sits across from us. We’re not sure if he is a well-off tourist or a businessman. He is in his late thirties or early forties, is tall, broadly built, and has a slightly prissy air about him. When he boarded in Sophia he carried, in addition to his suitcase, a lidded wicker basket stuffed with food. For the past forty minutes we have watched him munch on black bread, yellow cheese, sausage, pickles, smoked fish, and chocolates, and have seen him guzzle several bottles of Fanta orange pop. He avoids our gaze, glancing out the window every few moments at the blank fields.
Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he belches. We can smell his sausage-scented burp from across the compartment. It’s torture. He rises, places the basket on the open overhead rack, and exits the compartment to visit the toilet at the end of the car.
As soon as the Austrian is out of sight, Irish Michael hauls his basket down and is brazenly distributing food. We are like destitute urchins from the back streets of a third-world slum, snatching bits of cheese and sausage. We don’t steal all of it, just a little, just enough to allay the hunger for a few moments. We hope he won’t notice. When he returns from the washroom, he immediately checks his basket (which Michael has reinstalled overhead) and notices the missing comestibles. He gives us a disgusted look and haughtily moves to another compartment, taking his basket with him.
It’s a gruelling trip. Two nights sleeping sitting up on a hard wooden bench, three days with little to do and even less to eat. At last, in early evening, we glimpse the lights on the hills around Trieste and feel an extraordinary elation. We are back in Italy. Back in the West. Back home, more or less.
In Venice, we descend from the train and can think only of food. We find the closest restaurant and gorge ourselves on a feast of pasta and wine, blowing much of our remaining money. But the food! To taste such food! A plain Italian meal, but nectar of the gods to us. Almost four decades later, I can still smell it, taste it, feel the fullness of it, the sweetness and the salt, the garlic and tomato, the rich red wine.
When we return to the station, we realize we only have enough money to buy three tickets to Florence and will have to hitchhike back to Rome from there. We don’t care. Our stomachs are full and we are content as we sit on the train. We arrive in Florence late at night, and by this time the fatigue is overwhelming. The plastic chair in the train station, with all its curves in the wrong places, is a machine built for torture, not sitting or sleep, but I must stay in it until the first light of morning when we will walk to the highway and stick our thumbs out.
At dawn, we are so stunned with fatigue, we misread the map meant to guide us out of the city and get lost trying to find the highway. Eventually, we stumble upon the entrance ramp to the autoroute to Rome and nearly weep with frustration at the sight. At least one hundred other students and young people are already hitchhiking in the morning’s angled sunlight.
We sit down on the ground and bow our heads. When we raise them again, we are cheered, because every truck climbing onto the expressway is stopping for people to board. Either the Italians are the world’s most generous drivers or they are incapable of living for more than an hour without company and conversation. In fifteen minutes, the crowd has cleared and we too are sitting in the cab of a truck on our way back to Rome, the driver babbling on and on about almost nothing, his hands flying off the wheel at regular intervals to gesticulate and give his words life.
Back at the school, I strip off the clothes I’ve been wearing night and day against the cold for a week as I prepare for the delights of my first shower in far too long. (We had no access to a shower or bath while in Istanbul.) I peel off my socks and throw them directly into the garbage. Something in the air smells like that reeking Turkish Limburger we gobbled on the train.
2
Rome, etc.,
1967–1968
High in the air over the Atlantic, we are four hours into our flight. I sit next to Lebanese Michael on a chartered KLM jetliner that is winging us from Chicago to Rome, where we will begin our third year of university in the first week of September. The plane is packed with over two hundred students from thirty different universities around the United States and Canada who have decided, like us, to attend the Loyola University campus in Rome.
Bulging eyes bleary behind thick eyeglasses, Michael raises a bottle of Heineken to toast.
“To an outrageously fascinating year in Rome, one of the few major cities in the world with a specific date to mark its founding: April 21, 753 B.C.” Michael always had fascinating facts handy to spice up his conversation.
“No doubt. It’s already fascinating,” I shout as I glance around the plane. Approximately 220 students and four male KLM stewards are drunk. Not just tipsy, but head-smashed-in, buffalo-jump drunk — and raving. The noise level is shaking the windows in their plastic seals and the aisles are filled with running, jumping students, shooting booze at each other, suitcases tumbling out of overhead bins, girls screaming and guys hallooing. In the rear galley, two of the blond Dutch stewards are smashed, pink faces pinker now that they are flushed with drink. They sit with nineteen-year-old girls on their laps, all probing each other’s tonsils with their tongues. Next