Barcelona

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I greet you all from the brutal heat of a Barcelona Summer. Before I start talking about Barcelona, I will update you on the end of Rome and Madrid.

We spent a day at the Vatican, visiting St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. We also saw Pope John Paul's tomb in the Papal catacombs, and it was really inspiring watching all these pilgrims from all over the world break down in tears at the sight of his headstone. St Peter's Basilica is absolutely stunning, both in its scale and its ornate architecture and decorations. It is massive and gorgeous, with paintings and statues lining the walls of its massive Cathedral. I really don't have enough superlatives to describe it so I will say, as the sign outside did, that it is the Greatest Church in the world.

Rome was a beautiful, beautiful city with amazing food, narrow streets that stink of exhaust, and attractive, well-dressed people. We ended our too-brief trip there by putting our luggage in storage at our adequate hotel and walking around the city for a while. We had a few hours to kill before our flight to Madrid so we wandered over to the Old Jewish Ghetto. I could tell immediately that this was a different kind of ghetto than we had seen in Prague or Budapest, as the street behind the Great Synagogue was lined with Kosher resturants and it was filled with young children playing in the street. I had a kosher hot dog (the all-beef hot dog doesn't exist in Europe; neither does the Bagel or the pancake and French Toast is uncommon. Breakfast here stinks, it is all stuff like croissants, and glazed rolls. Not the best way to start your 35-hour work week). We signed up for a tour of the synagogue, museum & ghetto area.

The synagogue itself wasn't very impressive, especially compared to the Great Synagogue of Budapest, and our ghetto tour got cancelled when there wasn't enough people to hit the magic threshold of 5 when giving a tour makes economic sense. A nice old guy started talking to us outside, and he offered to show us around when the museum staff didn't come through.

He was a former guide at the museum who has since retired. He's a Romanite Jew, whose ancestors came from the Land of Israel to Rome around 2200 years ago. The first Romanite Jews were sent as emissaries from the royal court of the Macabees to the greatest empire on earth. Jews continued to come to Rome for economic reasons, to take advantage of the greatest market in what was then the capital of the world. He said that the community continued to grow as Jewish slaves were brought to Rome. The wealthier Jews who had come to Rome in earlier years would go to the market and buy the Jewish slaves and give them their freedom, and those freed men and women joined the community. He said "My ancestors did that, just as American Jews freed Russian Jews twenty years ago." The community grew again with Sephardic Refugees and a later, smaller settlement of Ashkenazim at the turn of the 20th century and an influx of Libyan Jews in the 1960s. The community currently has 10 active synagogues.

The reason there still is a community is that Mussolini's government refused to deport Jews to death camps in Poland. He considered the racial laws to be silly and enforced them half-heartedly. When the Nazis occupied Italy the Italian people, civilized for 2,000 years and understanding exactly what "deportation" meant, did almost everything they could to disrupt Nazi efforts to round people up. There are plaques all over the ghetto area with the date when 1,000 Roman Jews were rounded up and deported. What the plaques don't say is that there were roughly 8,000 Jews living in Rome in 1943. The local fascist party (!) caught wind of what was going to occur, and warned the community to flee or hide, and almost everyone fled. They hid in convents, neighbor's homes, and the country side. When the Nazis realized that the Italians were not going to be of much use (of course, the Italians hadn't been of much use to anyone during the War, but that's another story), they gave up on solving the Jewish Question in Italy. Our guide's family had hidden in the mountain home of a Catholic family. After the war, he came back to Rome and ran away from home three years later at the age of 15 and joined the Haganah, the predecessor to the Israeli Defense Forces, and fought in the Israeli War of Independence. He moved back to Rome to rejoin his family and worked as a tour guide, showing people all of Italy. He pointed to a large building in the ghetto and said "My grandfather used to own that, but Mussolini took it from us." When we suggested that he should take his claims into court, he laughed.

The ghetto itself is four blocks by four blocks, and had a main gate with a fence running around it until it was closed in the 1800s. It is opposite a big church, where the community was forced to come every Sunday until the 19th century and hear a sermon about why they should all convert. It was a purely missionary Church, and it reads in Hebrew and Latin inscriptions above the doorwar: "The Jews are going the wrong way." The Jews filled their ears with cotton before they went in order to avoid hearing the sermon and possibly being persuaded. The synagogue was actually two synagogues, with the main Romanite synagogue in the larger structure and an old Sephardic synagogue down a basement passage. The street that the synagogue is on is called Catalonia street, in reference to the substantial number of Spanish refugees who found a new home in the Roman ghetto. The term ghetto itself is an Italian word that became infamous when it was used to describe the run down area of town where the Jews lived, and became more universal in that it can now describe any run down area of a city inhabited by inhabitants of one ethnic group or class.

The museum was disappointing, but I think that is a symptom of the fact that this is not a dead area, it is very much a part of a vibrant community. Instead of a building filled with 80,000 names, like they had in Prague, for tourists to see, they had a Jewish High School with 800 students. Less useful for tourists, but it was still nice to see signs of life instead of memorials of death. The synagogue had a massive Italian police garrison, and our guide explained that it was because the PLO attacked the synagogue in 1982, launching grenades into the crowd and wounding over forty people and killing one two-year old child. The Italian government has taken the responsibility of guarding the synagogue rather seriously since then, and there were multiple people with automatic weapons standing guard all day. Like the synagogue in Turkey, road posts made it impossible to park near the building and detonate a car bomb. It is a sad commentary that the creation of Israel has led the Jewish communities of Europe to approach security precautions like Israelis.

One last tidbit on Rome. They must have a bank robbery problem because they have this screwy system. Bank doors are single-person pods. You stand outside the bank, hit the button to open the outer door, and after you walk in the outer door closes. The little chamber really looks like a pod, and it isn't something I would wish on someone afflicted with claustrophobia. You then hit another button and the inner door opens and you can actually get into the bank. The whole process takes about thirty seconds and makes getting into a bank a pain in the ass -- it takes time and can't be done in groups. You repeat the process on exiting the bank. I went into a bunch of banks looking for a place to change money and one of them even had a beeping metal detector that my watch set off, that scans people in the pod after they walk in the outer door. Oh, also, a large number of people in Rome ride around on motor scooters. These things don't look safe, and I saw a guy and his girlfriend take a nasty spill in the middle of an intersection. Romans seem to love them, and they do make sense given the ancient and narrow roads.

We then took a short flight from Rome to Madrid. Madrid is a city I don't have much to say about because we only spent two nights there. It isn't a city with a lot of historical sites; nearby Toledo contains much more of interest, but we didn't make it over there. Madrid is the capital city of Spain and had a nice castle, but all castles pretty much look the same at this point -- we've now seen castles in Prague, Budapest, Madrid, and Istanbul. The food stunk, but that could just be in contrast to how good it was in Italy. We stayed in a hostel which was loud, hot and uncomfortable, and filled with bachelorette partiers from England. We went to an art museum with a lot of Picasso's and Dali's, but I don't really appreciate art. For those of you who do, the signature piece of something about the Spanish Civil War by Picasso. It was enormous and had a lot of people hovering around it, nodding and whispering. I also nodded so it looked like I was less ignorant than I am, but all I can tell you is that it had a cow that is somehow symbolic of something. I don't have the attention span to interpret art.

We made our way from there to Barcelona by train. Barcelona is a beautiful city with really wide roads and massive squares with outdoor resturants. It is right on the water, and the food here seems to be better than in Madrid -- I've noticed many Dunkin Donuts, as well as the usual Burger King's and McDonald's. I hear there is a Hard Rock Cafe here too, but I'll be hard pressed to convince Richard "the gourmet" to appreciate American food again.

We went to the Gaudi Church today, which was visually stunning. It is one of the nicest and most interesting buildings I have ever seen. They started building it in 1881, and it is in the model of a gothic Cathedral, but Gaudi was the architect and he was exceptionally innovative, with the result that it has a very unique and appealing look. The facade outside portrays the life of Jesus, and it was exceptional. We walked from there to the Gaudi park, where I saw more interesting buildings. I don't understand why more cities don't hire a whacky architect to make buildings that look like they are from Dr. Seuss books; it's Barcelona's major attraction.

Last night we stayed at this luxury hotel that STATRAVEL referred us to after our travel arrangements were screwed up. It was absolutely amazing. I had a bath and lounged in a bathrobe with slippers (!!!!) before going out for the evening. It was the kind of luxury living you miss out on when you stay in Hostels. We moved back to a more reasonable hotel today. By the way, the deals that travel agents can get are ridiculous. This hotel quoted us a rate of 144 Euro (about 172 dollars) but the travel agents got it for 120 dollars. Deals like that are the only things that will keep agents in business in the age of the Internet.

Well, I think that is it. I'm going to go shower before dinner (which isn't til 1030 around here, for some reason). Thanks for making it this far if you did. I'll be back in the U.S. soon, and I can't wait to return to the land where bagels are plentiful, W.C's are called bathrooms, history is a subject you take in school, and people who don't speak English are ridiculed by late night talk show hosts.

Oh, one joke for the road -- What do Detroit and Rome have in common?

No matter where you go in the city, you can't help but trip over ruins. Go Pistons!

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