Venice, Rome, and the Vatican – May 28th to June 2nd

Finally I've gotten around to writing up something on my trip to Italy, the country I most wanted to visit while studying abroad this semester. The plan was to take a late-night train ride from Vienna to Venice, explore Venice for several hours, and then take another train down to Rome.

VENICE

So, after a very long train ride from Vienna, which among other things consisted of an hour and a half stop in Salzburg for no apparent reason, I arrived in Venice at about 9am (this being after having left Vienna at about 8pm the previous night). Since our train to Rome was going to leave at 1pm or so we didn't have much time in Venice, though from what I've been told there isn't a ton to do other than wander and get a feel for the city.

So wander we did. As with the other European cities I've visited I passed many churches, restaurants and, in more touristy-areas, a good deal of souvenir stands. But Venice is by no means your typical city. In place of roads, there are canals; in place of cars, there are boats; in place of streets there are narrow alleyways; and in place of street names/signs, there are...well nothing really, other than the occasional directional sign pointing to major areas (such as St Mark's Square).

Luckily, my group managed to navigate through Venice to see several attractions. One was the Grand Canal. Unfortunately we didn't have time for a gondola ride through the city, but I did take a few photos and later walked along the canal. Another was the Piazza San Marco, or St Mark's Square. The largest attraction there was St Mark's Basilica, the cathedral of Venice. After walking in the Basilica our time in Venice was almost up, so we headed back to the train station. But, being in Italy, we had to stop to eat some Italian food. Can't remember exactly but I believe I had some sort of seafood salad. After that, I was on my way to Rome.

ROME

After yet another long train ride I had arrived in Rome at about 8pm. We checked into the hostel and then went out for our first Roman dinner. The first and best part of the meal was easily the Bruschetta (grilled bread rubbed with garlic and topped with olive oil and tomatoes). We then headed out to take some photos of the Colosseum lit up at night. But that certainly did not work out. The Colosseum wasn't lit up, there were city vehicles of some sort parked in front of it, and what looked like a group of firefighters, a few with flashlights, was on one of the upper levels of the Colosseum. I'm not sure what they were doing, since there was no signs of a fire or any other sort of emergency, but they were clearly up to something. Anyways, around the area we ran into a group of girls from Boston, a guy from Slovakia, and another guy from Ireland. According to them the Colosseum was not lit up due to a marathon being held in Rome that weekend – the 92nd Giro d'Italia, as I later found out (which ran from May 9th to May 31st, starting in Venice and finishing in Rome).

After some much needed sleep and a refreshingly-inexpensive breakfast at the hostel next morning, we were off to see the Colosseum again – this time to take a tour. I don't remember exactly what was said on the tour, but some impressive details, such as the fact that the Colosseum was built in only 7 years – quite an amazing feat for something that large being built almost two thousand years ago. Another thing I remember is that apparently only two Christians were killed in the Roman Colosseum, making the Christian band that entered while we were there to sing something about martyrdom seem a bit excessive.

After a short break our tour moved on to Palatine Hill, the centermost of the Seven Hills of Rome. According to tradition, Palatine Hill is where Romulus founded the city of Rome. On top of Palatine Hill is what remains of the Flavian Palace, the vast residence of the Roman Emperors. I don't remember exactly but I think the tour guide mentioned that, among other things, the Emperor had his own private race track at Flavian. I guess that's the 1st century equivalent to having a private movie theater. We moved on to the Roman Forum, the central area around which ancient Roman civilization developed that was politically and economically the center of the Roman Republic and Empire. Inside the Forum grounds were various temples, basilicas, arches, and other structures.

Later on that day we visited the Pantheon, a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome built by Marcus Agrippa, the key general of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Today it's used for masses, and in venturing inside we stumbled onto a choir group singing Amazing Grace. Leaving the Pantheon I happened to stumble onto Palazzo Montecitorio, which is a palace currently used for the Italian Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of parliament). The next stop was the Trevi Fountain. A traditional legend about the Trevi Fountain is that if visitors throw a coin over their shoulder into the fountain they are ensured a return to Rome. Not being superstitious I didn't do that myself; hopefully that was not a mistake as I would very much like to return to Rome some day. One random bit of trivia that I found online - approximately 3000 euros (~$4200 USD) are thrown into the fountain each day, which are used to subsidize a supermarket for Rome's needy.

Next on the agenda were the Spanish Steps. The Scalinata, as it is called in Italian, is the longest and widest staircase in Europe. I was quite confused as to why they were called the 'Spanish' steps, and I now finally got around to looking that up. The history was not quite what I was expecting to find - evidently they were only built in 1723-1725 when French diplomat Étienne Gueffier bequeathed funds to link the Bourbon Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. As you can see from the photo the area was extremely crowded when I visited. Only on the way back from some later travels did I notice the Fontana della Barcaccia, a fountain at the base of the steps which, at the time, was completely obstructed by visitors.

VATICAN

The next day we headed out to the Vatican. Conveniently enough, on the last Sunday of each month entrance to the Vatican museum is free. Unfortunately I guess that is also when most Italians choose to go, so we had to wait somewhere around 2 hours in line. The museum itself was really an overwhelming experience – tons of artwork, sculptures, and statues. There was even a whole Egyptian section for whatever reason. As you might be able to tell from the photos I took I initially tried to get everything, but that quickly proved impossible. Here's one example that stood out to me that underlines just how extensive the Vatican's collection is: with the exception of a little bit remaining in some pillars at the Roman Forum, the Vatican holds the vast majority of the world's supply of Egyptian Marble – one of, or perhaps the rarest form of marble in the world, worth about as much as gold per ounce.

After a quick gelato break we then went on to St Peter's Square. Other than a long line wrapping around for entrance into the Basilica it was not all that crowded which was interesting, although I guess that makes sense given that at that point we were well into the afternoon. Apparently the Pope or someone else of significance had been there earlier, as chairs were lined up outside the Basilica, but whatever was going on was long gone when I arrived. I took some photos inside the square and then moved on to the Basilica. The Basilica itself was, of course, very impressive. For whatever reason it seemed larger up close than when I took photos of it from a distance. And the ceilings were very, very high inside the Basilica – obviously the designers focused on form above function when designing the place.

LAST DAY IN ROME

Monday dragged on a bit, a combination of having seen most of the major attractions the previous two days and rainy weather. But as the train back to Vienna left at 7pm, we had some time to make the most of the day by taking a tour of one of the Catacombs of Rome. The catacombs themselves are massive – had I been separated from the tour guide I imagine I could have easily gotten lost done there. One interesting tidbit – even to this day small mass services are held down in the catacombs. I don't think I'd like to go there for mass regularly, but it would be a neat, if a bit morbid, experience.

Finally, after the catacombs tour we checked out of the hostel and headed back to the train station to board the long, long train back to Vienna. It was a bit of a mixed experience – on the one hand, for the first few hours I had to put up with the ventilation not working and a rowdy bunch of American backpackers. But those problems eventually resolved themselves. One random but interesting experience was having an opportunity to use my limited Spanish with a couple Argentinians who were sitting next to me. They were importer/exporters vacationing in Europe. Given the state of my Spanish we eventually reverted to English, but I did get to have an interesting chat about South America with them before falling asleep for the rest of the ride back.

One random concluding thought: it was not until passing a calender for sale that had a picture of Mussolini on it that I gave any thought to that dark period in Italy and Rome's history. I guess that is because, to me anyways, he and his fascist state seem quite insignificant when looking at the broader history of Rome and its impact on the world – being among other things the seat of one of, if not the, most influential civilizations in world history, then capital of Christianity for nearly a millennium, and later, through the Vatican, the capital of Catholicism.

So that was my trip to Italy. As much as I liked Greece, all in all if I had to choose between the two I'd definitely pick Italy – or at least I'd rather study or live in Rome than in Athens. I hope not throwing a coin into the Trevi fountain doesn't come back to haunt me...

Additional photos from Venice - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619293657926/

From Rome - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619212453651/

And from Vatican City - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619213289809/

Mauthausen Concentration Camp Tour

One of the things I had most been looking forward to do while in Europe was to visit a concentration camp. On May 26th I finally had that opportunity when I took a group tour to a lesser-known camp, Mauthausen, as part of my CSI Vienna cultural exchange class. The tour, combined with an approximately 3-hour bus ride each way, was an all day affair. But it was definitely worth it – while I've read a good deal about the Holocaust, actually seeing and walking inside a concentration camp was a very interesting and, even moreso, a very disturbing experience.

Mauthausen concentration camp is located in by the small neighboring town of Mauthausen, which was then part of Nazi Germany but today is part of Austria. The camp itself was designed to hold only 5,000 people, yet at its peak over 22,000 prisoners were held there. To give a sense of perspective, only 2,000 people lived in Mauthausen at the time. Our tour guide described the camp as a city in and of itself (albeit one pretty much totally removed from what we would define as a city today). Over 200,000 people from over 35 nations were brought to Mauthausen, and well over half of those died there.

The main entrance to Mauthausen.

At its core, the concentration camp system was an industry to eliminate those who did not fit into Nazi ideology. In addition to the more well-known religious (such as Jews and Gypsies), racial (Slavic peoples), and political (communists, social democrats, and more generally anyone openly dissenting from Nazi ideology), our tour guide reminded us that many of those people brought to camps like Mauthausen suffered because they were deemed “asocial”. The tour guide mentioned one man from Vienna was brought to, and eventually died at, Mauthausen because he was deemed “shy of work”. And the story didn't even end with his death – the man's wife received a letter a few months later from the SS. In it, they claimed her husband had died of a heart attack. Moreover, the SS used her husband's death as an opportunity to try and make money - in the letter they claimed that the body had to be cremated for 'hygienic reasons,' but offered that she could purchase what was, supposedly anyways, his ashes in an urn for a substantial amount of money.

Anyways, the tour guide took my group on a tour following the process by which new prisoners were initiated into the camp. The path up to the camp was itself very brutal - for example, the tour guide mentioned that, of a group of 25 healthy, mid-20s Polish men being brought to the camp, only 19 made it from the hill from the train alive. Those that survived were likely saw a yellow cloud hanging over the camp. This, according to a former Italian prisoner, was the result of fumes gathering from the crematory when the air pressure was low. In other words, a literal cloud of death hung over the camp; an apt preview of what was to come for most of those brought to Mauthausen.

Once they made it through the gates to the camp, prisoners would go through what were euphemistically referred to as the “formalities of admittance.” Prisoners were first taken to what was called the “wailing wall”, where they had to give up all their belongings, were stripped of their clothes, and were then, naked, made to stand facing the wall. They were sometimes left standing there in place for hours or even days on end – the tour guide mentioned that one group, for whatever reason, was forced to remain standing at the wall for 3 days straight. The camp leader, Franz Ziereis, welcomed new arrivals with his dogs. Any resistance or protest by the prisoners to their new and appealing environment would result in said prisoner being torn apart by Ziereis's dogs in front of the rest of the prisoners.

The wailing wall, where prisoners, upon entering the camp, were stripped of their belongings, their clothing, and were then often forced to stand for hours or even days on end facing the wall.

After that introduction to what kind of life awaited at Mauthausen, prisoners were led to the shower room. Given everything seen so far you might assume that is also a euphemism, but in this case the Nazis meant literally what they said. Of course, showers weren't provided for the prisoner's benefit, but instead were there for logistical reasons: the SS, not wanting to lose their workforce, feared the spread of epidemics in the tightly-packed camp. So, for the sake of greater war production, new groups of prisoners were forced to stand naked in the shower room while being washed off.

Even so, the shower could and was used as an instrument of killing. The tour guide described what was called a “shock shower”. The guards would rapidly (every minute or so) alternate between very hot and very cold water in the group shower, the shock of which would kill weaker prisoners. Efficiency was the rationale behind this - viewing each prisoner solely as a temporary source of labor, the Nazis only wanted to invest their resources (i.e. feed and cloth) those prisoners that would last the longest. The shock shower and the previously-mentioned process of forcing prisoners to stand naked for hours or days on end at the wailing wall were thereby designed to weed out less healthy, and thus less valuable, workers.

Not a euphemism, the shower room was actually used to clean prisoners. Of course, the purpose of this was solely to prevent the spread of disease in the camp (bad for productivity), and in any case the Nazis still found ways to utilize it as an instrument of killing.

After the showers, new prisoners were stripped of all their bodily hair by other camp inmates. Given the sheer volume of new admittances, this had to be done very quickly. You can imagine what the mix of impatient guards and razor blades often led to. After being stripped of their hair (and probably a good amount of skin too), the prisoners were then covered in disinfectant fluid for hygienic reasons.

Onto the barracks. Each was designed to house 300 prisoners, but throughout much of the camp's existence they held between of 600 to 800 prisoners. As you can see in one of the photos, the central room of the barracks I entered has 8 rocks on the ground. These were where the barrack's 8 toilets once stood – 8 toilets for over 600 people. Not only that, but inmates only had 30 minutes each day to make their beds, eat, shower, and to use the toilet. Obviously that was not enough time for each prisoner to do everything. The tour guide mentioned one prisoner's recollections - he had to think along the lines of “can I afford to go to the toilet today, or should I wait until tomorrow? If he went to the toilet, there might not be enough time for him to eat, which would leave him less likely to survive another day of harsh manual labor. And even if he managed to do both, it was highly unlikely there would be enough time to shower, leaving him more susceptible to disease. I can't even begin to imagine what being confronted daily with those kind of dilemmas must have been like.

One of the camp's cremators

Most prisoners were made to work in the quarry, carrying stones weighing between 80 to 120 pounds along a very hazardous path for 10 to 12 hours a day. That alone would be torture. But compounding the woes of the inmates was their lack of adequate sustenance. Just how bad was it? The tour guide mentioned that in 1942 the Nazis carried out a survey of the health conditions. This was at the peak of Nazi power, a time when, if they wanted, the Nazis could have supplied prisoners with adequate food. The results speak for themselves: the average weight of prisoners deemed 'healthy' was only 48 kgs (105 pounds). And the amount of food the prisoners received was only enough to keep a fully bed-ridden person healthy. If anything, I'm surprised the average life expectancy was as high as 2 weeks.

The tour guide recounted that a survivor once told him that you have to be hesitant to call death in the camp a death because, by that point, they were so tired and wasted away. While the image I had of death in the Holocaust was of the mechanized, almost assembly-line style process of the gas chambers, overall this was the fate of most victims: being reduced to an almost-unhuman entity lying in its own waste in a corner, avoided even by fellow prisoners (who didn't want to contemplate that this would likely be their fate in a matter of weeks). Compared to that, the fairly quick death of the gas chambers seems almost humane.

Still, while not the primary means of death Mauthausen did contain a gas chamber. It is pretty self-explanatory what happened there, but one interesting thing I did learn was about the “crematory commandos” (or something like that). They were prisoners whose job it was to pick up dead bodies from around the camp and bring them down the crematory (the reason, again, being for hygienic reasons). As the defeat of the Nazi regime became imminent the Nazis attempted to kill these prisoners, as they knew all of the Nazis's secrets and thus could testify to the allies about the full extent of what went on at the camps. Fortunately, the tour guide mentioned that at least three are known to have survived to tell what happened.

The "Stairs of Death", which many prisoners had to climb for hours on end, while carrying 100+ pound stones from the quarry below, while operating on a totally insufficient diet, and without the aid of the stone steps you see there in the photo (which were put in some time after WWII for tour groups).

Two stories from survivors told by our tour guide stood out most to me. The first was a recollection one prisoner had while walking down to the quarry. On the way past the gate he looked at one of the guards, and the guard looked back. In that instance, this man thought that, if circumstances were different, their positions could well have been reversed. That I think is probably the most frightening aspect about the Holocaust of all – that most of its participates (soldiers, guards, etc) were basically normal people. Their motivations to do this kind of work were, in their own words, things like wanting to have a secure job, a social group where they would fit in, not having to go to the front, and so on. That in no way excuses their crimes, but it is a reminder that the Nazis were, at their core, human. Given the right conditions, such atrocities could happen again, and indeed have in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and so on.

The second, which I thing speaks most deeply about the horrors of the concentration camps themselves, was a story told by a survivor that the tour guide called the most honest person he had ever met. This man recalled that one day he woke up and noticed that his father was not moving. He said that he had hoped his father was indeed dead, as he knew his father had saved a piece of bread from the previous day to eat in the morning, which the son wanted to survive. The story (and unfortunately I'm probably missing some details) I think illustrates dramatically the depths of dehumanization brought on by life at the camp. As the tour guide said, to really understand life in the concentration camps you have to rethink or forget everything you know about how humans relate to one another.


Additional photos are here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619071246511/

Also, a couple articles with additional information on the camp:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005196
http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.php

May update on life in Vienna

On the first of May I went with several UI students to Prater, Vienna's famous amusement park. It is the location of Vienna's famous Ferris wheel. Information on its other attractions is avaiable here: http://www.prater.wien.info/index-e.html. It was fun being at an amusement park for the first time in a couple years, though Cedar Point in Ohio is still my favorite.

Later that weekend I went to Schönbrunn Palace, the former residence of the Habsburg royalty. Mitch advised that we skip the palace tour, so instead we explored the grounds of the complex. The place is huge, and the gardens went on as far as I could see.

More recent activities included tours of the Organization of Petrolum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, the International Atomic Energy Association, or IAEA, and the United Nations office in Vienna. I found the OPEC tour very interesting. The PR representative gave a presentation to our group in the conference room used during official meetings, and on the way out were given several books/reports and a polo shirt. The organization is basically a cartel of 12 major oil exporting countries. The PR rep made a persuasive argument of how maintaining oil price stability is beneficial to both producing and consuming nations. Producing countries benefit from being able to better judge the financial risks and benefits to further oil exploration and from more stable government revenues. Consuming nations benefit in that businesses are better able to predict fuels costs in their operations, and society more generally from the reduced risk of catastrophic spikes in the price of oil, as happened in 1973 and 1979. What was also interesting to me is that, despite how vocal and controversial some members of OPEC, like Iran and Venezuela, can on the international scene, the organization itself is very non-political. For instance, the organization continued to function even while two of its members, Iran and Iraq, battled each other during most of the 1980s.

My tour of the UN and IAEA (housed in the same complex) began on an unexpected note: a saftey drill was apparently scheduled that day. That unfortunately left us with only enough time to sit inside one of the meeting rooms before needing to leave for our scheduled presentation by the IAEA. And the day didn't really get any better there: the presentation was fairly lackluster, at least compared to the one at OPEC.

Otherwise I've spent most of my time here working on classwork and hanging out with Illinois and European students. I'll have something up about my tour of Mauthausen concentration camp and my travels in Italy soon.

Anyways, here are photos from Schönbrunn Palace - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619152222244/
and then photos from the UN and OPEC tours - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619068661869/