Ostia Antica

With Dad and Jacqueline on their way to Rome, I asked the kids if there was anything they wanted to do or see in Rome if we headed down for the weekend.  Connor said, "Ostia Antica.  I just read a book about it."

A friend here told me about the Roman Mystery series, and Connor has been gifted some now from his grandparents, his parents, his aunt and uncle.  He loves them, and I love his learning a bit about the Romans and Greeks.  The kids have asked for a long time whether they will have to take Latin.  I've said no.

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My mom made me take Latin in high school, at least for freshman year.  At the end of freshman year, having taken one year of Spanish and Latin concurrently, I had to choose one: I chose Latin because I never put Spanish on a Latin test, but I occasionally put Latin on a Spanish test.  If Latin was winning out in my brain and on the spaces on my tests, I thought it was the one to do.  I loved Latin -- how there were so many endings and how everything would eventually fit together to make the sentences work; how what Sister Louise was teaching us in English class freshman year (a la her penmanship filled photocopies of grammar rules) I could see in parallel constructions and gerunds and participles later on when we were reading Vergil and Cicero (I liked grammar even back then).  And I made friends in those Latin classes.  Katie Hayes (of 13 kids in her family) and Alisa Intravaia (of 6 or 7 kids in her family) and I watched out the window one late morning as Sister Ruth walked up Medford Street and we sat in the classroom waiting for her for Latin class.  Rule-followers, we reported to the office and stayed put in the classroom without her.  The next day she laughed about forgetting to come to class.

A couple years later we sat in scary Mr. Murray's (he wasn't actually scary, but the rumors spread about his yelling at a girl or making fun of kids; he was harsh and blunt and actually quite funny) basement English/Latin classroom, looking out the window at the parking lot in the spring, while he mocked the spring seniors who came back and hung out in the parking lot: "They can't wait to get out of here, and then they come back and hang out in the parking lot!"  He wasn't wrong, and he's still not wrong: I see the same thing at Thayer every year, but we see the parking lot from our second story Latin classroom in the distance as the seniors take over the parking lot that the juniors think they've inherited, but haven't quite yet.  In Mr. Murray's basement classroom, I learned about Laocoon, that Trojan priest who told the Trojans, "Don't take in the horse!  It will ruin us!  Beware Greeks bearing gifts."  Okay, that's not a literal translation, but that was his message.  Minerva was pretty peeved since she loved the Greeks and wanted to see the Trojans go down, so she sent two slithery, fiery snakes across the water, all the way up to Laocoon and his two sons, and had those serpents kill all three of them.  I'm not doing justice to the Latin here -- there's the use of "salt" for the sea; the "s" alliteration to hear the slimy, scary, hissing of the snakes; the image of fire in the eyes of these dracones.  The Trojans think, Oh, golly -- gods are peeved with Laocoon; we better take that horse in, and we all know the rest.

Mr. Murray.  The basement classroom of Arlington Catholic.  Laocoon passage two years in a row.  I love to share this stuff with my own kids, showing them the Laocoon statue at the Vatican (a photo of which is in Latin books) or showing them a video about Pompeii or talking myths.  And have I wanted them to take Latin?  Yes, in some way I have.  Because I think it's so good for them in so many ways.  And it's been rewarding for me on so many levels.

But now they're learning Italian.  Reading and speaking and listening.  And I've thought, Maybe another language would be better for them.  A language spoke somewhere in the world.  What I want for them the most is the confidence to speak another language, a confidence I lack at times.  I'm fine messing up when I'm by myself and just trying, but I get self-conscious.

But Ostia Antica...

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Connor wanted to go.  I was motivated to make it happen.  Three kids and I staying at a vrbo spot near Piazza Navona motivate to figure out the bus and the train.  If the six of us are together, Daniel takes on this role.  I felt a little nervous taking it on and super excited, too.  If I messed up, so what?  The kids and I would still have a good time, likely no matter how long it took us to get there.  Some standing in the rain, a bus ride through Rome, a train ride, a pack of Italian-style Starbursts to count as breakfast and everything else til we arrived around 11:30am -- perfect.  Daniel and Sebastian drove from Viterbo to meet us (having stayed in Viterbo Friday night for basketball practice and meditation) and we raced to get our tickets.

Ostia Antica was a port for the ancient Romans.  It's like a mini-Pompeii less well-preserved, entirely less crowded, much closer to Rome (Pompeii is about four hours from Rome; Ostia Antica about 45 minutes).  From the gate we walked in we encountered first the necropolis -- the ancient cemetery --and a sarcophagus or two.  As we walked the main road, the large stones reminded us of our bike ride along the Via Appia Antica months ago.  We listened to the audio tour about a basilica, climbed up steps to look down onto a mosaic floor of the ancient baths (pretty sure Mary walked right on them as she traversed the ruins with her climbing until we told her that actually, you really can't do that, climb over and under where those ropes are -- in Pompeii she would have realized much more quickly, but out here in Ostia Antica, there was only a handful of people around on this Saturday morning, and no one even noticed...even her parents noticed after the fact); heard the audio tour guide go over all the rooms of the baths -- apodyterium, caldarium, frigidarium, tepidarium, palaestra, laconicum.  I thought, I wish Latin 2H could see and hear this!

I've visited Ostia Antica at least once before, if not two or three times before -- it's a Classics program field trip.  I vaguely remember going and I mostly remember that we brought bagged lunches from the Centro (where we lived in college).  I remember my friends, especially Libby and Nicole.  And eating hard-cooked eggs and bananas that year, things I'd rejected before then.  I remember carrying around a clipboard for our maps and notes and listening to lectures.

But this time I remember most the theatre before lunch and a stroll after lunch.  On the way to the cafeteria (that had better food than the Rome restaurant from the night before), we stopped at the theatre.  The current family competition was jumping up the steps, legs together, all the way up.  Hannah was speedy speedy.  I was slow slow and still impressed with myself.  Daniel videoed.  All the kids tried.  We laughed, the kids trying again and again and timing themselves until stomachs won out and we headed to lunch.

After lunch Sebastian needed to head out for his basketball game in Rome.  Everyone was ready to go except for Connor.  He wanted to explore Ostia Antica some more.  So he and I stayed.  We walked slowly, no particular apartment or temple or structure in mind.  I poked in to some spots and pressed the number on the audio guide to listen.  We climbed some stairs and lay in the sun on an ancient second floor for some minutes.

I asked Connor what else he wanted to see.

He said, "I just want to walk around, look around.  I don't want to figure out the structures.  I just want to be here and look at it."

While it had been raining in Rome, it was blue sky with sun out here in Ostia.  We walked on a road that took us outside the city, closer to what looked like a dock.  We imagined that we were heading to the beach.  I told Connor the story that one of my students had just written, a fictional account of the emperor Claudius and his stint as an engineer in the Roman army.  By one major entrance we passed a group of students listening to a lecture/tour.  I tried to eavesdrop before Connor urged me along.  Back at the ticket spot, I turned in our audio guide (with no passport to hand over as security, I had had to leave 70 euro instead: I was not going to forget to turn that guide in) and headed to the train station.

No clipboard.

No lecture.

Some jumping.

Some mosaics.

Some walking.

More than enough.