Reflections from a place much older than Phoenix
6/6/18 to 6/17/18 – Pisa, Rome, and Venice – Italy. Vatican City – the Vatican
Crew – My entire family (Mom, Dad, and two sisters) plus two other families.
Waking up in a bright room with a bunch of people with concerned expressions staring at you is not something I’d recommend if you are given the opportunity. You have to do the awkward “sorry, my bad” as you kinda scamper off then nearly knock yourself out a second time and look like an idiot. Worst of all I wasn’t even drunk at 2 am or anything. It was 9 am on a Tuesday morning in High School. And I had just fainted.
… And no it wasn’t in Sex Ed if that’s where you went. I do remember that happening to someone in the 5th grade though, pretty funny. It was because I was missing a pint of my blood.
See, most of my love of random knowledge is due to a teacher or professor metaphorically hitting me over the head until I understood the point and importance of learning it, and maybe even the fun of it. It’s one of the reasons I like traveling, to go see these textbook paragraphs with my own eyes. But this has not always been the case. I was once so interested in not going to AP Euro that I volunteered to give blood at the local blood drive. Great plan Sam, it definitely wasn’t 2nd period your senior year and you could’ve just not shown up. There were three tiny problems with this.
The first is that I’m not a fan of needles. Second I don’t do well with blood. Oh, and there’s a minimum weight for giving blood, and when I showed up I was exactly 1 lb over the line where if I gave less they’d have to turn me away. But because I didn’t want to go back to class I responded “Sure” to all their questions and got stabbed with a needle.
If anyone hasn’t done it before, it takes about 15 minutes for them to take out the necessary amount of blood and during this process, you can just mindlessly scroll on your phone. And as a treat when you were done there were all sorts of fun high-salt and sugar snacks they gave you and made you sit down while eating them. Since a healthy human can lose that much blood, doesn’t mean you won’t be lightheaded. Because I was so close to the weight limit the nurse who I was chatting with made me lay down an extra fifteen minutes before I could even go get snacks. So I texted folks, messed around, and eventually stood up.
I made it a whole steps three steps. Then for the first and only time in my life so far I fell unconscious and face-planted on the mat in the High School gym. Which brings us right back to where we started, with a bunch of people looking concerned at us.
And I did THIS ALL to just avoid having to learn about European history. Oh wait we’re going to the day summer vacation starts to tour European cities? Oh sick, sign me up, what was I saying?
Italy was a trip imagined between three families, one with an annoyingly stable family relationship and two with just about the exact opposite. The idea was for the first part to be all three families in Pisa and then we were all splitting off. My family was going to Rome and then Venice.
To even arrive there would be its own complication. Those days I was a junior in high school at this point and senior graduation was the day that my parents were hoping to fly out. Lily and I delayed an extra day with my dad for both the last day of school but mainly to see our friends graduate (and it was a lot of them that year). That was great, I got a lot of photos with friends. Genuinely one of the best memories of High School.
Then I went out with friends who were my year and the group I’d been with on the last day of school for years now. And we might’ve gotten a little tipsy. And that was the day I learned about flying somewhat hungover! At 6 am! A thing I have become very acquainted with flying home from Michigan. And to Michigan. And sometimes to and from Phoenix. For whatever reason I always end up drinking more than I should right before flights.
(This is no great mystery. It’s because I overwhelmingly fly domestic when either a holiday is starting or ending or/and I have either started or finished a school semester. I ain’t changing anything though.)
So two not-ideal flights later (and I passed out in a lounge during a layover), we arrived in the Italian countryside, near the city of Pisa. Which is not shocking, very pretty.
Pisa
Our first destination showcased the relative speed of people on vacations. On one hand, we had one family who was pretty content to just relax and enjoy some well-earned vacation. It was gorgeous, there was wine, and after all the school year had finished and everyone wanted a well-deserved break. How often do you get to hang out in the French countryside? On the other side of this, we had Kerry, who is an ICU nurse and was vibrating from standing still by 9 am each day.
(Point of order, my own family is very bad at standing still, and I’m no exception to it. I could never imagine a career right now where I stand still all day everyday. But as I’ve learned with a few of my friends, full-time night shift and especially healthcare workers are a different weight class entirely. Kerry is both).
Alas we did actually motivate and go do things during these first few days. We visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa! That was pretty cool, albeit I was certainly not willing to go up into the tower. I had a nasty fear of heights around this time. I mean I still do, I’ve just gotten a little better with it. And the photos do somewhat do this thing justice, it looks like it should’ve fallen over. I’m pretty sure Lily got one of those touristy “kinda-have-to-do-it” photos of you holding the tower up. She’d probably be embarrassed if I asked her to post it on this site.
I didn’t know this at the time but there was a stretch in the 80’s and 90’s when there was a genuine fear the tower was going to come down. The tilt had continued to worsen, increasing to a 15 ft lean, and so a conglomerate of civils and hydrogeologists were dragged in to figure out what to do. The key to the rehabilitation was in realizing that the water table was unbalanced, and pumps were brought in to drain the groundwater under the tower. Over the next 2 decades, the soil solidified and the tower reduced the lean by 1.5 ft. Which I mean, isn’t much but it isn’t in danger of falling over anymore… we think.
I asked at the time why we couldn’t just build up the foundation but you would just spend money for nothing at best and damage the structure at worst. Sinking buildings due to incorrect foundations has happened all over the globe, like the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, and solving it is never an easy task. Geotechnical engineering, the branch of civil specialized in dirt, deals with foundations and is a branch many civils are rightly scared of. Dirt acts irratic, is hard to control, and if you mess up a building’s foundation you’re more or less doomed unless you have a country backing you with enough greens to prop their historic building back up.
During one of these adventures, we realized something fun when my mom asked: “Aren’t there supposed to be 5 of you?” to one of the families.
“Oh yeah” replied a parent then they frantically looked around before realizing the number of people was only counting up to four.
“Oh shit” was the next thing they said.
Turns out they had left the middle child at the house while we had gone to an art museum. So hey there’s the bar and our family clears that one!
Well… except for the time my parents booked my ticket to LA the wrong day and I had to fly there a day late on my own when I was 13 years old… BUT hey that wasn’t too far away and at least realized before the day of. Was I 13? Honestly, I can’t remember anymore.
We did other things to kill time. At one point I might’ve needed a slight spine realignment but I hopped out of the rental car and followed the sign into the restaurant I was told to show up to. Turns out that driving on the cobblestones of a castle and monastery-turned-town was not the smoothest road. Probably because the architect wasn’t intending a mid-size sedan to be on it, or knew what a mid-size sedan was. But hey it was free real estate and we now have cars so it all worked out.
Lily and one of the other kids managed to get ahold of a pile of booze which was fun since all the kids were in one house and the parents were in another. Nothing like not being allowed to drink making drinking a hell of a lot more fun. And I mean I really can’t complain too much about such things. If you wake up in the Italian countryside and can go running to see the vineyards in the distance it’s hard for me to have an issue with it.
End of the day the first few days of this trip were relaxing, enjoyed some Italian countryside, and there was a chef providing dinner for the place so all the parents were just glad to not have to be taking care of us.
Rome
*taps microphone*. Alright, I’m going to drop a real hot take and an unknown destination people should visit.
“Rome”
*Applause erupts in the room*
Kidding aside, yes Rome is worth seeing and yes it is not exactly a rare destination. It’s got everything: An empire that many people think about on the many, good food and weather, and still a thriving scene plus easy logistical access.
I being an archaeology nerd loved running around the various ruins. And since Lily and I were truly amateur lovers of Rome thanks to Percy Jackson’s books (the 2nd series includes Rome), we already had all the basic details for the religion. And I honestly don’t remember when I started watching this YouTube channel called “Overly Sarcastic” but they provide all the necessary snark and love for going over Rome’s rise, reign, and collapse. They also do basically every other historical and cultural topic there is so that’s cool.
There’s also another YouTube series called Oversimplified that has done some actually hilarious videos of the Roman Punic Wars. Whenever they release a YouTube video it becomes #1 on YouTube so I’m not really alone in this opinion but I’ll start recommending it.
We saw the temple of Jupiter, the Trevi fountain, what remains of the old forum, and of course the Colosseum. Some of it’s in pretty bad shape but a lot of it is in actually decent condition. This has led to one of my favorite recurring topics that I get asked about a lot due to more work. Which is Roman concrete!
(Please skip ahead, oh give or take one page if you want to ignore this rant).
Short answer: Is Roman concrete better than modern-day concrete? “No but please see[1][2][她][$][0_0][[γ].”
Long answer: Roman concrete does have a few key advantages over average modern-day concrete. First, it has the ability to self-repair cracks which has let some Roman infrastructure survive into the modern day (nearly 2000 years). It also possesses pretty good structural compression strength and is easy to manufacture if you happen to live in or near Italy.
There are three large issues with Roman concrete, however.
The ingredients that make up the difference between normal and Roman are volcanic ash and saltwater. Both have issues. Saltwater is corrosive (and the bane of naval engineers everywhere). In almost all modern-day concrete we use reinforced concrete which is steel rebar put into the beams, and steel rusts like hell. So we now can’t put rebar in anything. This rules out its usefulness for buildings, highway overpasses, and pretty much anything that has to be built up.
Volcanic ash is expensive. Roman concrete is four or five times the cost of average modern-day concrete. In a world of tax dollars and tight construction margins, this is not great. Especially because in a road where we constantly dig it up to access the utilities underground or tear a building down to rebuild using super expensive materials is a waste of time. Why build to last 1,000 years if it’ll only be torn up on purpose after 10? The price is significantly cheaper if you’re close to a supply of volcanic ash, but many places aren’t.
We don’t actually know how long it lasts. There’s a natural survivorship bias to Roman concrete because we only see what has survived. If 1% of the road network has survived that does not mean that the other 99% was equally strong. We could be looking at the extremes and don’t even know it.
This is not to say that Roman concrete is a waste of time. There are niche scenarios where it’s helpful (domes, a lot of domes) and it’s a testament to the ancient engineers that they could still design and build such impressive works that I’m stuck here arguing this with people in my life. Plus their aqueducts do work relatively well, albeit nowhere near as good as modern ones.
Trust me. We know it exists. We just don’t want to use it.
CAN YOU TELL I HAVE OPINIONS ON THIS
Do see the Colosseum though! It’s much larger than you would think and besides the classic gladiators and animals eating people, it would host absolutely insane events. For example, they would literally flood the arena and then have naval battles for the entertainment of the crowd with multiple trustworthy historians saying that there would be 3,000 people per naval battle. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be the most fun thing to witness.
(Ok disclaimer that Rome was also barbaric and for some emperor’s reigns it was designed as a public execution more than anything else. Some historians note that during for example Caesar’s reign, none of the 3,000 contestants who entered the naval battle left alive. [Cassius Dio, Roman History 43.23].
Lastly, we did stop by the Vatican to see the Vatican city. I also don’t have many photos of this because I don’t think they liked us taking photos in there but I had finished the Da Vinci Code recently when we visited and let me tell you I was obsessed with the unbelievably large set of catacombs there are underneath the Vatican. They contain documents of the church dating back to its founding. Ooh that just inspires a sense of mystery wondering what is truly down there.
All of this is on display in Rome, you should see it, and its history continues well into the modern world. They have genuine issues expanding the subway lines or building anything underground because they’re bound to hit a new archaeological ruin that demands the attention of historians and leads to a lot of grumpy construction foremen.
Venice
The last stop on our trip was Venice, another city that *checks notes*, yep is as good as everyone says. I mean the idea of a city that can mainly be traversed by water only is such a cool concept that it means the city is just not competing with much else in the uniqueness category.
There is 100% the argument that the city is mainly for tourists and that’s an issue but it’s still a great place to see if you ever get the chance. I’m not going to get into the weeds of the issue with a city of 50,000 having 20,000,000 tourists per year but it’s at the point where there’s a fee to enter the city during the high season. [3]. It’s a post-covid creation thought so we didn’t experience it even if we had come during the high season. The city itself remains not too bad to navigate and be featured in so many movies as a cliche for a good reason.
I for the life of me can’t remember anything going haywire during this section of the trip but this is almost certainly due to time passed since this trip than anything else. I’ll try and remember and update this post someday but in the meantime, you get to listen to me ramble off random things I learned in AP Euro the year after I went on this trip.
The first is that no one actually knows when the city showed up [1], but it probably was founded by refugees fleeing the falling Roman empire due to constant invasions, sometime between the 2nd and 5th centuries. With the first doge being elected in the 8th century.
Originally a swamp, the city was built off of quite literally Roman coffins, as the limestone was waterproof. Those were placed on top of wooden stakes driven into the peat several feet into the ground. Peat is specific here because the Peat meant that even though they were below the water table there was no oxygen available so no life could cause decay to the foundation. It’s quite similar to how we make scotch. It’s hard to tell if the original folks building the city knew about this trait but as I tend to err on the side of “People have always been clever bastards, even if they had less info” I’m in the camp that they knew what they were doing.
As time went on it began doing what historically has been a lucrative activity: Trading with anyone who will listen. Mongols, ottomans, African nations, the European powers, you name it they were probably selling and buying through Venice. They even have an argument that they possessed the first factory in the world and by the 15th century was probably the richest city on Earth. Mind you most of the expeditions that ended up hitting the Americas were funded because people were sick of trading through the Venetian and Ottoman monopolies. Who can say that AP Euro wasn’t a worthwhile time?
The city sprung up a Jewish ghetto, which we visited, fought in a few wars and eventually faded from it’s famed position as new trade routes opened up around the world. It’s the monkey’s paw of a city wishing to become the #1 in some statistic, there’s only one way to go afterward.
And now the city is actively sinking. I mean many cities are, but Venice has sunk around 6 ft over the last few centuries which is not good for a city already under the water table. The city has built retractable gates, and flood control, and has been adapting in real-time to the changing conditions. The geotechnical reports for the city are an absolute mess and as buildings go farther up it becomes increasingly hard to anchor the city.
On top of this, you overlay climate change and you have a city that now floods hundreds of times a year instead of the few times it used to. [2]. So much like when they originally built the city, when I visited it was obvious that there are many better places to build a city. But that insanity to build in a swamp is what gives Venice its charm. So I suppose I appreciate it.
What’d we learn? Mainly every single city we saw has members of my profession running around trying to fix things. Between the leaning tower of Pisa leaning a little too much, Venice becoming too well acquainted with the ocean, and Rome continually building on top of itself it was a country of millennia old issues with generations still hammering away at the problems. To be snarky I appreciate the job security but to be idealistic there’s something inspiring about these older cities and how people across the ages worked together trying to keep it working for one day more. And to be truthful I still prefer these cities quirks and all over your average American city built after 1900. They have issues but they also have a character you just don’t find in modern design. I might be legally obligated to make fun of architects whenever I can but I do wish they had more say in our cities.
Also passing out to avoid a 90-minute lecture is a great story but I did just spend longer than that happily writing up the history of these places. We’ll call that a wash.
Also, wait hold up let me check the timeline real quick. Hah ok. Yes, this trip also has a distinct award as the last one my family ever did. I suppose it wasn’t the worst way for it to end. God my parents are going to hate me laughing about this on this site.
Cheers,
Sam
[1] Bosio, Le origini di Venezia
[2] Silvestri, Manuel (3 October 2020). “Mose flood barrier finally holds the waters back for fragile Venice”. Reuters. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
[4] Mills, Eric (2020). “The Great Sea’s Greatest Battle”. U.S. Naval Institute. Retrieved 7 April 2024.
Dead Man Travelling 