Baths and Persecution

One of the interesting places that I found while I was walking around near the station was the Via delle Terme di Diocleziano or the Road of Diocletian's Baths.  The road ends up in a little roundabout with a fountain in the middle.  One side of the circle was a really large, fancy white building with stores in the bottom.  But the other side of the circle was a very, very old building made out of red bricks that were crumbling into pieces, they were so old.

This is just a tiny part of the Diocletian baths.  Diocletian was a 3rd century AD Roman emperor.  (Who was kind of a scary looking fellow.)  He is known for a few things.  First, for his political innovations and reforms, which strengthened the empire significantly.  One big change that he made was setting up co-emperors, and then co-caesars, so that Rome was ruled by a tetrarchy, or a government by four people.  This made succession much smoother and allowed him to resign from office instead of being assassinated.  Second, he is known for instigating an extremely vicious persecution of Christians.  John Foxe, in his Foxe's Book of Martyrs, records the Diocletian persecutions as the the 10th persecution and includes a bunch of really unpleasant stories about the kinds of things that happened, including pictures.  I've copied that section of the book (which is in the public domain) and posted it as its own post, in case you want to read it.  It is a bit gruesome but it might be a good history lesson?  Interestingly enough, Diocletian was the emperor right before Constantine, who made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire.

Third, Diocletian really, really like his baths.  The Diocletian Baths were the largest baths in Rome but the buildings also included libraries and other important official meeting places (it wasn't just a place to bathe).
This website (which looks like it is someone's school project) looks like it has some interesting information about the baths.  As near as I can tell (from estimating from different sources, it looks like the whole Baths compound is about 1,500 x 1,200 feet.  That is five football fields by four football fields!  The Baths were built by Christian slaves and, at least according to some sources I found, the slaves marked crosses on some of the bricks and you can still see them, if you know were to look.  That was one of the reasons why there are now at least two churches in the building.

The little bit of the old Baths wall that I saw from the street is part of what is now the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (the Basilica (which is a kind of church) of St. Mary of the Angels and Martyrs). 

If you go here, you can see the English language version of the church website.  It has a lot of pictures of the church interior, as well as panoramas of some of the halls.  If you click on the "Guided Tour" button, and then choose a room or area, you can see pictures of the rooms and the history of the room and paintings.  If you go here, you can see the Italian website.  The first picture down is a video tour of the church.  Unfortunately, the descriptions are all in Italian, but it is still a very pretty church.  The whole Baths complex is now a national museum.

On interesting and very relevant tidbit is that after he retired from being Emperor, he moved to the Dalmatian coast.  He actually lived in what is now Croatia, (a very beautiful part of the coast, too!) but the Dalmatian region was actually very broad and included what is now Albania.  And, just a few hours after I stopped at Diocletian's Baths, I headed to Albania!

"The Tenth Persecution Under Diocletian," from "Foxe's Book of Martyrs"

This is the section on the Diocletian Persecution, as outlined by John Foxe.  (The text is in public domain but I got these particular images from Google Books.)

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(page 44 was just the blank back of the prints)

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I wasn't loving it too much (except for the coffee, which was pretty good, actually)

When I got to Rome I started walking, looking for the church.  It was actually pretty pleasant.  It wasn't too hot, early in the day and it was kind of pleasant to walk through the streets of Rome in the early(ish) morning.   It was starting to get busy, with tourists on the sidewalks and cars in the streets, but it wasn't hard to cross the streets yet, which made things much more pleasant.  Apart from not being able to find the church quickly enough, and already being late, it didn't seem like such a bad start to the day.

One thing I noticed was that there were just as many homeless people walking around the streets, and lying in the parks and little grassy roundabouts in Rome as there were in Milan.  I was walking across one particular street, in the cross-walk, when a homeless lady started walking toward me.  There were signs up all over the train station and metro warning against pick-pockets and thieves, so I was kind of making a point of paying attention to my surroundings but I figured she was pretty safe, since she was holding a piece of pizza in each hand, and I wasn't very worried.  So, I was looking around at all of the very old buildings and somebody just ran into me.  I was startled and started to apologize.  And then I realized that the street lady had walked all the way across the street from the little roundabout just to body-check me, and then turned around and walked back to her little pull-cart of belongings on the other side of the street.  That made the whole day seem less fun.  I realize that it is probably not fair to judge all Italians on the actions of one (presumably) mentally-unbalanced homeless person.  However, in all of my travels, that was the only time I was ever attacked, even when surrounded by large groups of inebriated people, homeless people, and/or beggars (and some of the little begging children were very insistent). 

I was kind of upset by the whole "attack of the street lady" thing and when I came across a McDonalds, since I was too late to get to church, it seemed like the perfect place to get breakfast and to experience a little bit of homieness in a distressing situation.  

I will say that while I was in Europe I was very conscientious about eating in local places.  During the entire year I was gone, I only ate at an American chain restaurant once, except while I was in Italy (and that was because the Burger King was the only place serving warm food in the train station late at night while I was traveling back home).  While I was in Italy I am afraid that I ended up eating at McDonalds an awful lot.  On the other hand, as far as I could tell, that was a super-authentic Italian experience.  There were McDonalds on every street corner, practically, and they were always full.  

So, I was happy to have the opportunity to experience something like home.  I was also looking forward to having some super-fast service à la an American international corporation.  What I wasn't prepared for was how much McDonalds tailors its business model to the local community.  (If you look here, you can see some of the international foods offered in different countries.  Italy has Italian-type hamburgers.  If you scroll down a ways, you can also see the McKroket that the offer in the Netherlands--typische Nederland (just like the Dutch)!)  Well, in Italy, they really like their cafés and their coffees, so in most of the McDonalds I saw, the McCafé menu would take up two-thirds of the menu board, with the rest of the menu just squeezed into a corner.  In others (like the one I went to Sunday morning in Rome) it was like a big McCafé, with a tiny McDonalds tucked in at the side.  I was actually pretty okay with that part of the adaptations (and, I will say this, coffee in the Italian McDonalds was way better than the coffee you get in American McDonalds).  Unfortunately, another adaptation that McDonalds made was in hiring Italians and adopting a more Italian plan for time management.  When I got in line, there were three people ahead of me and it took more than half an hour to get through the line.  However, when I finally got some food (I had a giant cappuccino and a brioche, which is like a croissant that is baked with chocolate chunks inside) I went downstairs into the little basement eating area (lots of the McDonalds in Italy were on two, or even three, floors).  It was cooler down there (it had been getting progressively hotter) and I got the chance to figure out where I was in the city and how to get back to the train station and how to get to the Colosseum, which was my next stop.  I was pretty relieved.  It made for a nice, restful (and cool!) break in between all of the crazy Italians.

(If you click here you can see something about the McCafé.  It is in Italian, of course, but if you are looking at in Google, it will translate for you.  And in any case you can see what it looks like.  You can see the menu here, but it was pretty much typically Italian--you could choose combinations of coffees or cappuccinos and brioches or croissants or tortes.)