Pictures and Gund

Italians walk uncommonly slowly along the street, but why hurry when it is such a nice day, and there is a park on one side of the street and ancient architecture on the other? On the other hand, though there may be seperate street lights for pedestrians, why bother waiting for the little man to turn green? Just pick your moment and stride straight through traffic -don't hurry or you'll look like a tourist- with your head held high. Timid people or foreigners who hesitate will even notice that the tiny cars and high-heeled Vespa riders automatically slow down at the sight of waiting pedestrians, and are surprized if they don't take advantage of the break in traffic.

Enough with the descriptions. You people demand pictures.

The problem is that when it comes to the famous sites, there are so many much better pictures on the internet and other places for you to look up. In fact, it is one of the small pleasures of life for me to open a huge book of gorgeous photography and be able to say casually, "Yeah, I was there."

What is awesome about being here is being here, able to touch what millions of people throughout the centuries have touched, able to experience the vastness of certain places, to note the casually perfect collections of angles in a view from a back street. Pictures really can't convey the experience. They just prove that you were there because your smiling mug has been inserted into the frame.

With the knowledge that I was about to take photos that would be exactly the same as thousands that have been taken before me, I invited my friend Bobby Gund to help me out. Somehow, the process was made slightly more enjoyable with the introduction of something that really could not be explained.

Here we are at the Fountain de Trevi.

Here we are the edge of the Spanish Steps, which are not particularly interesting in themselves, but are great places to watch tourists wander around in the heat with maps, and pretend that you are not secretly one of them.

Here we are by a magnificent fountain which caused some scandal when it was unveiled due to its sensual nymphs, but it is so big that you cannot really take a picture of the whole thing.

Here is a great one of Triton. We became rather familiar with this towering aquatic sight since we got lost together and used this piazza as a reference point. There is a street that goes right through everything called Via d. Tritone which ends here.

Did you know that unless there is a sign declaring to the contrary (I have yet to find one) you can drink the water? It is incredibly wonderful, on a hot day, to remember this when you stumble upon one of the bazillion fountains randomly scattered throughout the city.

It think that the bees, which are scattered throughout the monuments of the city, are the symbol of some rich family that paid for most of the stuff. You can even find them in the Sistine Chapel.

For your amusement: a smoking centurion. Our Art and Architecture professore, who had just finished an impassioned explanation of Etruscan art and history, had made us all laugh by suddenly admitting that he did not like visiting the Colloseum because, "Eyeh hateh theh fake Romans!"

That's all for now, folks! Tune in next time for "a day in the life," a commentary on allowing dogs on the metro, or maybe a newsclipping about how some crazy american student became a great cat burgler and stole designer clothes until she was tracked down by the police, who figured out who she was by the size of the clothes she was buying. Seriously. I didn't care about designer clothes until I was faced with streets of the stuff. Now I am wishing to be a model.