I knew you'd have some good stuff--gratias agimus tibi! And since you ask, what I most need are telling details about the trains (and other public transport, but chiefly trains), and one or two museums or schools where one might find someone quietly working on thaumaturgical research related to roads.
There are two kinds of train in Rome. There's the trains which go to other cities in Italy and to the rest of Europe, and those come into Termini, which is the Giant Train Station And Shopping Mall in the eastern part of the city. Termini is surrounded by hotels and cheap food and clothing places; some of the hotels are good, and since it is Italy you can get good train station food to take on the train with you or if you get in at ridiculous o'clock. Termini is also a bus depot. It is also one of the sketchiest parts of the city, in terms of pickpocketing, begging, sexual harassment, street peddlers, and so on. The Evil Bus Jo is talking about runs from there. Train tickets to other cities/countries are relatively cheap. Trains are comfortable and have power outlets and sleeping cars and all those good things. BUT all the tracks are marked in ways which may not make that much sense, and intervals between trains may make for weirdly long or short layovers.
The other kind of train is the Metro. Both subways and buses have a ticket system, where you buy a ticket and you put it in a machine and it deducts your fare, but the Metro is somewhat easier to use than the buses, because it generally has visible ticket machines which sell tickets in multiple languages. You buy bus tickets in convenience stores and tobacconists' and there are no signs about that anywhere. With both things, it is common enough for tourists to fail to understand what is going on that I have seen people intentionally get free bus rides by looking confused and repeating the word 'what' in a foreign language until the driver waves them in. In the Metro, transit police do random stops to see whether passengers have paid their fares correctly; non-Italians will generally not be fined if they have a ticket but couldn't figure out what they were supposed to do with it, because sometimes it's not obvious. Anyone will be fined for not having a ticket at all.
Every inch of Metro track can and should be viewed as a grudging compromise with the past for the needs of the present. Expanding the system is almost impossible. Building new tunnels takes years because every time the tunnel advances another five feet it hits a new and priceless archaeological discovery. I am not exaggerating. Generally what happens is that they call in archaeologists, who do site evaluations quickly in situ, and then there is a fight about whether whatever it is is significant enough to call the tunnel off, or whether the City will give the archaeologists a set amount of time to do what they can before proceeding with construction. If the tunnel will proceed, there is a fight about how long the archaeologists get, but five years is standard. So the five years go by, the City advances the tunnel through the site, they dig another five feet... and it happens again with something completely different and from a different period. This is why the Metro system is so limited and does not go near many of the most interesting things, and that is never going to change.
These issues do not come up so much with constructing things that aren't trains because they just simply don't dig. And mostly they don't need to. If you are building a house, you don't need to excavate a basement, you need to break into the catacombs that are already down there, and then you use those. A restaurant I frequent, Cul de Sac, has a tiny little narrow space upstairs but a MUCH larger wine cellar which was pre-Christian and not really a wine cellar, and they don't pay rent for that bit.
I did an undergraduate thesis on the development of the road system around the Vatican under the early Humanist Popes of the Renaissance, so if you want to know more about that than any human being needs I am at your disposal. Museum-wise, the most likely place is the Museum of the City of Rome, Museo della Civilta Romana, which is heavily focused on daily life and the evolution of the city over time. School-wise, if your character is American you want the American Academy in Rome, no question, getting a fellowship there is one of the Holy Grails for classical and architecture students. Many European nations have similar academies in Rome. I don't know anything about the relevant Italian institutions.
Any chance of a Skype or Google Video session tomorrow? We could chat about roads and also catch up in general. And I can tell you about what I'm doing today, which if all goes well will be an experimental tour of DC's past, present, and future with an emphasis on infrastructure and nanotechnology.
Tomorrow is not the best day for that on my end, I'm afraid. Email with some proposed other times, as I am probably much less booked up than you are on account of not having a nine-to-five job, and we can make this work?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-11-16 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-16 04:54 am (UTC)The other kind of train is the Metro. Both subways and buses have a ticket system, where you buy a ticket and you put it in a machine and it deducts your fare, but the Metro is somewhat easier to use than the buses, because it generally has visible ticket machines which sell tickets in multiple languages. You buy bus tickets in convenience stores and tobacconists' and there are no signs about that anywhere. With both things, it is common enough for tourists to fail to understand what is going on that I have seen people intentionally get free bus rides by looking confused and repeating the word 'what' in a foreign language until the driver waves them in. In the Metro, transit police do random stops to see whether passengers have paid their fares correctly; non-Italians will generally not be fined if they have a ticket but couldn't figure out what they were supposed to do with it, because sometimes it's not obvious. Anyone will be fined for not having a ticket at all.
Every inch of Metro track can and should be viewed as a grudging compromise with the past for the needs of the present. Expanding the system is almost impossible. Building new tunnels takes years because every time the tunnel advances another five feet it hits a new and priceless archaeological discovery. I am not exaggerating. Generally what happens is that they call in archaeologists, who do site evaluations quickly in situ, and then there is a fight about whether whatever it is is significant enough to call the tunnel off, or whether the City will give the archaeologists a set amount of time to do what they can before proceeding with construction. If the tunnel will proceed, there is a fight about how long the archaeologists get, but five years is standard. So the five years go by, the City advances the tunnel through the site, they dig another five feet... and it happens again with something completely different and from a different period. This is why the Metro system is so limited and does not go near many of the most interesting things, and that is never going to change.
These issues do not come up so much with constructing things that aren't trains because they just simply don't dig. And mostly they don't need to. If you are building a house, you don't need to excavate a basement, you need to break into the catacombs that are already down there, and then you use those. A restaurant I frequent, Cul de Sac, has a tiny little narrow space upstairs but a MUCH larger wine cellar which was pre-Christian and not really a wine cellar, and they don't pay rent for that bit.
I did an undergraduate thesis on the development of the road system around the Vatican under the early Humanist Popes of the Renaissance, so if you want to know more about that than any human being needs I am at your disposal. Museum-wise, the most likely place is the Museum of the City of Rome, Museo della Civilta Romana, which is heavily focused on daily life and the evolution of the city over time. School-wise, if your character is American you want the American Academy in Rome, no question, getting a fellowship there is one of the Holy Grails for classical and architecture students. Many European nations have similar academies in Rome. I don't know anything about the relevant Italian institutions.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-16 01:24 pm (UTC)Any chance of a Skype or Google Video session tomorrow? We could chat about roads and also catch up in general. And I can tell you about what I'm doing today, which if all goes well will be an experimental tour of DC's past, present, and future with an emphasis on infrastructure and nanotechnology.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 02:30 am (UTC)