Hey Virgil, Thanks for the snow

It doesn’t hap­pen very often– and I swore I’d eter­nally regret miss­ing when it next hap­pened– snow in Rome. And, as lady luck would have it (ahem, For­tuna was the sub­ject of my dis­ser­ta­tion, so we go way back) it snowed today– the very day I took my stu­dents to the Roman Forum for the first time this semes­ter. It couldn’t have worked out bet­ter for all of us.

http://www.youtube.com/v/qdZWJYRVRvc&hl=en_US&fs=1&

The light snow grew worse– but we man­aged to see our Repub­li­can houses on the Pala­tine hill. Then, we bar­reled down to the Roman Forum, where I had obtained per­mis­sion to view the Forum from the very cen­ter of the piazza (hint: the pub­lic is not allowed here). You might think it doesn’t make much dif­fer­ence, but I assure you it’s one thing to look onto the piazza and another to be stand­ing in the cen­ter, look­ing out. All of a sud­den, you real­ize how much space there is and you can appre­ci­ate, up close, a series of mon­u­ments and traces of mon­u­ments on the pavement.

The light snowfall/ slight rain­fall sud­denly blasted into a full blown snow­storm. Not only were we forced to leave the cen­tral piazza, the guards quickly forced the entire pub­lic from the site (I counted about 80 peo­ple). The shut­down was rapid for safety’s sake. Case in point, one cus­to­dian guard told me two tourists fell down by the Arch of Titus, and that was that. At least we’d all had our moment in the forum with the snow. It hadn’t snowed like that in 25 years. The stu­dents were excused from giv­ing their site pre­sen­ta­tions (to be made up next week)– again, For­tuna favored the brave. And an hour later, we ran into each other by the Pan­theon but the snow had already begun to melt in the steady driz­zle of the light rain.

Take a look at Matt Mandich’s amaz­ing slide show snow shots

These (below) are from my iPhone. Hand was freezing!

Share on Tumblr