A Black Eye Fit for a Colosseum Warrior
May 18-19, 2019
The staff at Ospidale san Carlo di Nancy took my information, gave us a number, and asked Arnie to roll my wheelchair out of the way and park me against a wall to wait.
The only visible difference between this emergency care unit and those at home was that in Rome, several of the patients who’d been pushed up against walls to wait were on stretchers. One had even already been hooked up to an IV. In Canada in my experience, they store people on stretchers behind doors in the halls of the emergency care unit – where they aren’t visible (or audible) from the waiting area – until they have time to treat them. I am guessing that the halls in Rome are narrower than ours, which would make concealed-hall parking impossible.
We waited and we waited. Many other ill and injured people arrived at emergency and were triaged. Those who were in worse condition than the ones in the waiting room were taken away for treatment, and those who were in equal or better condition took a seat or were parked among us. After a few hours, by which time it was dark, I was feeling less wobbly and light-headed, and we were tired, hungry, and grumpy (and, to quote one of my own novels, “several other adverbs that might equally well have served as the names of Snow White’s dwarfs”). Arnie asked how much longer the wait might be. We were told that at that point we were fourth in line, which meant about an hour, although anyone in more acute need of care would, of course, be treated first. We calculated that at the rate we were going, it might be several more hours before we saw a doctor, so we called a cab and went back to the hotel.
When I looked in the mirror in the bathroom of our hotel room, I was almost as taken aback at my appearance as the cab driver and then the front-desk staff had seemed to be when we’d returned from the hospital. I was pretty sure that the ambulance attendant had not got all the dirt out of the scrapes on my face, so I set to work to scrub them as clean as I could before I lost my final bits of courage. In the meantime, Arnie set off to find ice that I could apply to my abrasions, and came back with a hotel employee bearing some rubbing alcohol and two ice packs of the kind you freeze and then put in coolers or chests to keep your beer and sandwiches cold – except that these ones weren’t frozen. Apparently there was no ice in the hotel at all, and no way of obtaining anything colder than what they’d given us. So after we’d eaten a meal from room service, I took a couple of Tylenol and wrapped one of the coolish-packs in a towel and applied it to my face (a wholly inefficient treatment). Then both Arnie and I sank into our own respective exhausted but somewhat fitful sleeps.
I looked even worse in the morning, of course, and had a monumental headache, but since I was not nauseous (a symptom of concussion), I assumed that the diagnosis of “no concussion” was correct. We had tickets to see the Colosseum at noon and after tracking down the address of an international health clinic near the centre of the city that we could go to later, off we went.
We took the bus through a serious downpour that rapidly turned sections of the streets of Rome into lakes, headed for the metro train that would take us to the Colosseum stop. Thanks to my black eye, I was quickly given a seat on the crowded bus. There followed a conversation involving a lot of hand signals with an Italian woman of about my own age who was sitting across from me; I finally managed to explain to her what had happened to my face. (It was a few days before I stopped noticing every time someone looked at me with concern and curiosity, but I did continue to feel sorry for Arnie. I wished I could have worn a sign pinned to my chest with an arrow pointing in his direction that said, “He didn’t do it.”)
The woman on the bus (who used her hands as much to actually speak Italian as I did trying to speak it) was delighted to learn that we were from Canada. She took out her phone so she could show us the photos from her trip to Niagara Falls. But she couldn’t get the photos to come up on her camera, and her frustration with the bus’s lack of wireless reception drew others into the conversation until five or six of us were involved in an extended discussion involving hand signals, words in English and Italian, and some Spanish that I thought was Italian.
After getting off the bus we found an ATM and then the metro station, and with only one or two wrong turns we arrived soon enough after the start time of our tour that we were able to catch up to our group.
Rome’s Colosseum
I love that the Colosseum is so old that there are paintings from four centuries ago (such as the one to the left, by one of my most recent favourite artists) in which it looks almost the same as it does now. But even more I love how being in the Colosseum makes you think in earnest about the fact that soon after 80 AD, when construction was completed, great crowds of people were drawn to attend events on that very spot in the same way (and in the same numbers) as we are to professional sports events in cities around the world today.
(I did not love learning that the structure was probably paid for “by the opulent spoils taken from the Jewish Temple after the Great Jewish Revolt in 70 CE led to the Siege of Jerusalem” (Wikipedia). The article continues, “It is often assumed that Jewish prisoners of war were brought back to Rome and contributed to the massive workforce needed for the construction of the amphitheater, but there is no ancient evidence for that; it would, nonetheless, be commensurate with Roman practice to add humiliation to the defeated population.”)
Tales about the Romans throwing the Jews (or Christians) to the lions at the Colosseum are — according to our guide –”fake news”: the games were intended as entertainment, he said, not carnage.
Gladiators were housed in barracks just outside the Colosseum. Most died young (by about 25 years of age), not from the battles themselves but from infections caused by cuts from the iron blades they used as weapons.”Deaths did occur in the arena,” our guide told us, “but they were accidental.” Those who managed to live long enough to retire (around 45) became managers (Sound familiar?).
The seating capacity of the Colosseum was 50,000 to 60,000, which is approximately the same capacity as the Blue Jays / Rogers Stadium in Toronto. The games that took place at the Colosseum were organized by members of the aristocracy, and (one big difference between then and now!) were free to the city’s citizens.
The Colosseum was built on a clay base but water drained into the area, which necessitated the construction of a complex system of underground canals. One of the reasons that there were so many stairways and exit arches – again very similar to most arenas where professional sports are played today – was to allow quick evacuation of the building in case of fire, earthquake, or other emergency.
There is a lot of reconstruction underway at the Colosseum at present, made necessary by the effects of pollution and the general deterioration of a free-standing structure that is nearly two thousand years old. Each component of the reconstruction is undertaken with great care under the auspices of historians and archaeologists – who would, I think, learn as much from the process as they contribute. What a cool job that would be.
After our tour, we walked a couple of blocks away from the Colosseum and found a restaurant where we had yet another delicious lunch. We already knew not to buy food near a heritage site, no matter how inviting the place might look, because of the inflated costs. We saved many many euros in Italy by walking away from tourist attractions before we stopped to eat.
After lunch we took the metro back to the centre of Rome, where we walked up the Spanish Steps and then down to the Trevi Fountain. The rainstorms were long gone and it was a perfect day for wandering about. It was our last full day in Rome so before we went to look for the medical clinic, I insisted that we take another stab at finding the Borghese Gallery: we had, after all, paid for those tickets in advance.
This time we took a cab.
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