Part VIII: Around the World in 80 Days

By Temple Ligon
March 21, 2014

 
On March 29, 2012, I left Paris on the train for Milan, eating up my 15th day, leaving another 65 to make it back to the Capital City Club and to make it a round-the-world trip in 80 days.
 
In the planning stage, I had engaged Passepartout #1 for the North Atlantic crossing on the Queen Victoria. But when I called her to tell her we had scored unfunded upgrades all the way to the Queen’s Grill Penthouse suite, she had to beg off. Her employer didn’t like the idea of her absence for so long, almost two weeks.
 
Time for Passepartout #2, who thought the time on the Queen Victoria was not anywhere near as attractive as time in Italy, and she also begged off the cruise.
 
Passepartout #3 volunteered to climb onboard, beginning with the train ride from the Florence station next to the McLeod Infirmary. We rolled all night to New York, spent the next night in the storied Carlyle Hotel, and sailed past the Statue of Liberty on early Friday evening, March 16. My birthday, by the way, was that Saturday, the next day, and I got what I wanted: nothing. Luxury cruise ships are great at encouraging its passengers to do nothing. They want for nothing. And the next day they plan to do nothing. That’s the whole idea. It’s called vacation time, relax time, charge your batteries time, nothing time.
 
I read, mostly, but everybody around me, including Passepartout #3, honestly enjoyed themselves doing nothing. Oh, there was some swimming and some exercising and some dancing, but no one was watching the clock.
 
Immediately after we walked off the Queen Victoria, Passepartout #3 and I got on the train together for a full day in London, and we parted that night. After a few days of personal pursuits, to include a tour of the Morgan car factory in the Cotswolds, I left London for Paris. And after one night – one night, mind you – I left Paris for Naples. En route I stopped in Milan, my favorite train station. I hadn’t seen Berlin’s new station, all $10 billion of it, but the few times I had entered Milan through its grand and glorious gift from Il Duce, I declared Milan the winner of the best station prize.
 
This time, though, Milan was too successful, too attractive to out-of-towners. I couldn’t find a room, any room of any size at any price. I started looking around 8:00 p.m., and I gave up past midnight, taking a taxi back to the train station. The station was locked to all who had no business there and no ticket. My ticket was good for access to the station’s interior. The men’s room was locked. No trains were running. I walked the tracks about a block out of the station, peed on the tracks and walked back.
 
Maybe by 6:00 a.m., I guess it was, I was on my way to Naples by way of Rome.
 
I had never been south of Rome, and I was told the Indian consulate in Naples was a suitable spot to file my application for a visa to take the train from Mumbai (formerly Bombay) across the subcontinent to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). I had already established Internet communication with a French outfit running a freighter to India by way of Malta. So once I had my Indian visa, I could set out for Malta and the captain’s table on the French freighter. But when I stepped off the train in Naples and walked around the station, I made the quick decision for a return to Rome. The art historian in me overpowered the Phileas Fogg impersonator.
 
I did consider a train route to Jerusalem, speaking of historic sites. Jerusalem might be older than 4,000 years, and Romulus and Remus began Rome almost 3,000 years ago, while Columbia turned 200 in 1986. Go to Jerusalem? No. If anything should take another two or three days, such as my visa application, better to wait in the Eternal City than the home of three religions.
 
When Verne’s Phileas Fogg agreed to his wager of 20,000 pounds, about a million dollars in purchasing power today, he finished his card game, went home and told Passepartout they had ten minutes to pack their bags and be ready to travel around the world. That was it. That was the extent of Fogg’s planning. This was 1872 and there was no talk of passports or visas – not a problem. In an effort to illustrate how different our world had become, I chose the Fogg preparation plan to see if it could still work. I worried about China and Vietnam and their stark political stances, but I didn’t get visas for anywhere else under the assumption I could get right with governments as I went along.
 
I was wrong. But when I was told I could get my visa application for India approved in no more than two days in Rome, I believed it.
 
Back in Rome I returned to the hotel where I had stayed for four nights in 1998 when the rooms had no private bathrooms. The full baths were down the hall. My room had a window overlooking the Pantheon, almost 2,000 years on display in one building. It was finished in 125 by Emperor Hadrian, as in Wall and Villa. Around the corner was the Palazzo Capranica, a 17C town palace converted into a movie house and adjoining restaurant. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful was playing without subtitles. I saw it and didn’t get it.
 
I did get my friend’s recommendation, a coffee shop called Tazza d’Oro, which he called the best coffee in the world. Flying to London around Christmastime, 1997, my fellow traveler next to me explained that the best coffee in the world was in Italy, and the best coffee in Italy was in Rome, and the best coffee in Rome was in Tazza d’Oro.
 
He was an American, a resident of London and a PruBache broker who claimed the fastest time recorded on a speeding ticket in the UK for 1997. He was driving an Aston Martin DB7 six cylinder something like 150 miles per hour. The Brits took his license for the next year, fined him a fortune and put him in a position where he had to sell his beloved DB7. In Goldfinger, Connery’s Bond drove a DB5 six cylinder, if I remember that right.
 
Anybody who liked cars like that must know his coffee, I assumed. So much so I checked into the hotel 50 feet away from Tazza d’Oro and happily paid the $50 per night. Tazza d’Oro sold espresso in small china cups for about 80 cents, and long lines stayed long in the street outside the serving counter.  
 
The quality of the coffee might have had something to do with the annual summer retreat by France’s favorite couple at the time, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex. They stayed in a posh version of what I had facing the same town square, Piazza della Rotunda.
 
Since 1998, however, the place had been fully renovated and fully refurnished, replete with private baths and wood wall paneling. Where I stayed for $50 in 1998 was up to $200 in 2012. What the hell, $200 was not bad, after all, whenever I looked out at the Pantheon a hundred feet away.
 
Firmly ensconced, I took my map and my passport to Via XX Settembre, earlier known as the Strada Pia where Michelangelo and Pope Sixtus V put in Rome’s first straight street terminating at Porta Pia, the city gate and home to the British Embassy. The straight street was such a quick success many more were put down to organize Rome’s street plan for the year-long Jubilee pilgrimage of 1600 when 400,000 Christian pilgrims were expected to visit Rome, a city of fewer than 100,000.
 
The Indian Embassy was about halfway down Via XX Settembre towards the Palazzo del Quirinale, the president’s palace. Next to the Indian Embassy was the Indian Consulate, where applications for visa approvals were submitted. I first visited the consulate on a Sunday just to get started hopefully with some instruction. It was closed. The next morning, Monday, I showed before nine, stood in line and finally got inside to ask a few questions. No one wanted to field questions. The Indian officials jumped on me for not going online and filling out the paperwork before walking into their domain. Then they got all upset over my being a journalist. Was I a journalist on the job? I needed a journalist’s application. No, I said, I was not on a gig. I was simply running around the world in 80 days. They didn’t believe me.
 
Tuesday morning I showed again, this time with my request for a visa fully filled out. Then they said I failed to say whether I was a resident in Italy. I said no, I was an American. But, they needed to ascertain, was I resident of Italy?
 
Wednesday morning I got a little closer, but this time they were upset I didn’t tell them I was a combat veteran, a whole new category. I returned later that afternoon with what they wanted. Then they said I could come back the following Tuesday, a week away, to pick up my approved visa application.
 
Easter was the following Sunday, so I called Passepartout #2 at her office in New York. I told her I was stuck in Rome for another week. She laughed. Stuck in Rome, huh? Sounds tough. She agreed she thought she could slip away to arrive in Rome on Good Friday and stay through Monday. I explained to her what I had heard from the locals: If you want to have Easter with Pope Benedict, get inside St. Peter’s Square well before 8:30 a.m. even though services weren’t scheduled for another two hours.
 
Passepartout #2 surfaced at Rome’s main train station midday Good Friday. I paid 8 euros to get to the station from our hotel, so I had to assume a return trip from the station would cost the same. Passepartout #2, a New Yorker, was impressed with the scale of deceit among the taxi drivers. I can get you there for no more than 21 euros, guaranteed, they said.
 
On Saturday morning we set out to reconnoiter St. Peter’s to be sure we were oriented come Easter morning. We climbed the dome, what must have been 400 feet high. We got up there the way Michelangelo intended, inside between the two domes. I suggested to Passepartout #2 that most Mediterranean cities probably experienced a major earthquake once every thousand years or so, and Rome hadn’t had one in the past two thousand years. And here we were: Up 400 feet in a cement and brick dome with no steel reinforcing bars. Michelangelo had, in fact, put in huge chains wrapping the dome to hold it together, but I didn’t want to dilute the drama by telling her that.
 
That night we dined in what our hotelier called the best restaurant in Rome. We sat for dinner after an opera concert. I liked the restaurant because it faced the same piazza as Michelangelo’s Farnese Palace, the French Embassy since WWII.
 
On Easter Sunday we got to St. Peter’s with plenty of time to spare. We took our seats less than 100 feet from where Pope Benedict was supposed to stand. When we first arrived, there were a few hundred people around us, but by 10:30 when the service began, we turned around to see tens of thousands of people shoe-horned in behind us.
 
We had a brunch table reserved on the roof of the Hassler Hotel, the luxury property owned and managed by an American. It overlooked the Spanish Steps in what was called the American Neighborhood.
 
We were lucky. The Wednesday before when I called Passepartout #2 to invite her over, I dangled the brunch date as part of the enticement. I had walked into the Hassler for a drink, and I saw the advertisement for the brunch. I was told it was sold out, but then the hotel employee picked up the telephone to hear someone drop an Easter brunch reservation. It was offered to me instead of going to the waiting list. Fine. Yeah. I’ll do that.

(To be continued…) 

Reach Temple at – [email protected]