Our plans don’t include turkey. Imagine that. We’ll make an antipasto with a threesome of marinated black and green olives from the produce market and some tiny dried sausages made from wild boar. Then we’ll make some veal Milanese for the main course with some spinach sautéed in garlic and a stuffed yellow Sicilian pepper as sides. (The butcher had 3 pieces of veal to choose from. He’ll slice off as much as you want for € 20,99/kilo or he has some already pounded and breaded for € 0,01 /kilo more.) We also picked up some iced tea for me and a bottle of prosecco for Cinzia. It’s sunny and 66° today, so we’ll walk across the Tiber to Il Fornaio later this afternoon and pick up something sweet for dessert. So, those are our Thanksgiving plans. What are you having?
In my previous blog I mentioned that we were going to see the catacombs. There are 3 well excavated sites in the southeast of Rome which are easily accessed by hopping on a bus near San Giovanni in Laterano. After a little research Cinzia found that the best of the 3 sites was San Callisto. They offer guided tours for €8. All of the catacombs are owned by the Holy See. Our tour had about 15 people and lasted all of about 20 minutes. Photos were not allowed, but you’ve seen enough pictures of catacombs to know that they all pretty much look alike – rectangular holes dug into the underground tufa stone where bodies were laid to rest. Christians, along with everyone else, used catacombs to bury their dead. Rome, after all, is an old city and space was at a premium. We learned that there are some 60 catacombs in Rome and this one had 30 miles of tunnels which provided accommodations for 500,000 bodies – half of which were children. No bodies are found there these days as they have all turned to dust after 1700 years or so. It was interesting, but too short. We would have liked to have looked around the maze of tunnels longer.
According to the Christian tradition, these are the steps that led up to the praetorium of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, which Jesus Christ stood on during his Passion on his way to trial. The stairs were, reputedly, brought to Rome by St. Helena in the 4th century. It consists of twenty-eight white marble steps, now encased by wooden steps.
You can only ascend the Holy Stairs by crawling up them on your knees. I chose the adjacent staircase, presumably the Unholy Stairs, to walk to the top and have a look at the gilded altar tucked away behind bars in its own little room. The Holy Stairs were packed with pilgrims, mostly Asian, taking one step at a time, praying, and moving ever so slowly up to the top. On the top step there was a brass ring encircling a hole in the wooden stairs where you could reach down and touch the marble stairs repurposed from Pilate’s house.