{photos by Cozy Faber}
Buon giorno! Here's a Magical Moment from our Development Director, Cozy Faber. Cozy and her husband Jeff have two daughters on Track B in Upper Middle School, Ava and Sia. This is their 8th year at SLOCA, and today Cozy shares some significant moments from a recent family trip to Italy:
It was late in the evening for dinner and we were all tired—according to Jeff’s pedometer we had walked eight miles and the tender bottoms of my drive-myself-everywhere-I-live-in-California feet roared when I so much as thought about them. I sat across the table from the girls and decided as they each held their heads up in their hands too fatigued to whine, that an argument about “no elbows on the dinner” table was one best left to another night.
The waiter walked past and I attempted to get our dining experience underway “Scusi, scusi, singnore. Voligliamo bebere cinque aqua per favore.” I was determined that my high school Italian revived with a little practice on Duolingo would carry us through this meal. “Um…how you say…how you say.” I searched for the next request, attempted to locate my inner Italian vocabulary tried to conjugate on the fly—worked to impress the kids with my dexterity of mind and ability to just “pick up” another language.
“What do you want?” said the very Italian waiter in perfect English, not amused by my stupido Americano antics. Hands on his hips, his amusement was clearly nowhere near the level of ours. We all looked at each other and just laughed—howled, really at my attempt to become absorbed in the modern times of Rome. Totally. Did. Not. Happen.
I will tell you what did happen though. As we sat around that table and laughed past our fatigue, we started thinking about what we had seen that day, about what had been the most amazing thing and about which pieces were our individual “stand out moments.” Ava’s favorite that day had been the green door outside of a temple, built on the main drag of the ancient Roman forum. There were two purple pillars next to it—all original construction and the locking mechanism on the door still worked! She didn’t care so much about the lock, but did wonder about how many senators had walked upon the very steps she now tread. She did consider Antony and Cleopatra strolling down this avenue and she marveled quite enamoredly with the rest of us as we touched, with our own hands, the final resting place of Julius Caesar. (I must confess that I attempted an effort of getting our party to perform a group recitation of Mark Antony’s speech… you know…”we come to bury Caesar not to praise him.” However, two 12 ½ year old girls, a 22 year old college kid and a husband with sore feet were in no mood for that performance!)
Caesar's Tomb
There was another building in the forum with enormous columns rising up toward the heavens. Behind the columns was a door allowing entry into the building and descending in front of them was a staircase which captured Sia’s eye. We walked to the bottom of those steps and read the history of this building. Built during Ancient Rome, the structure had survived and been used through centuries but the stairs had been covered with mud and the erosion that comes with time. By the time that Michelangelo lived in Rome, the front door of this building was at street level. This one building sliced through history for Sia—from the ancients who entered via the stairs, to Michelangelo who just stepped in. And then, here we were in 2014—looking and learning and living this history of our human existence. Connecting.
Jeff’s and my favorite moment of that day though wasn’t down among the ruins of The Forum. We had taken a bus through the city to first get to the Colosseum—jostled and smashed up against the commuters. Ava sat in the window seat and maintained a running commentary, predicting what was happening in all the shops that we were passing….”Cena….hmm that looks like Latin, Do you think that’s a restaurant?” Over and over, she recognized words from her study with Mrs. Weinschenk and connected them to what must be happening inside their doors. I shared this with Jeff a bit later in the day, after we had discussed gladiators and seen where they prepared for their battles and seen where the elite senators would have sat as they watched the games.
Ava at the Colosseum
Our favorite moment occurred as we stood on Palatine hill, enjoying the cool shade of a tree while the tour guide explained how this was the very hill where Romulus and Remus commenced the entire Roman tale that started it all. My girls who are proudly and lovingly and classically educated, turned their heads to their father and toward me at that moment when they connected Romulus and Remus to Caesar and Cleopatra to Michelangelo and to themselves—all of them viewing this very same sky, breathing this very same air and loving the very same Rome. That remains the moment that Jeff and I bask in. We didn’t become instant Italians absorbed into their culture, but that city—that Roma—certainly did become absorbed into all of us.
View of The Forum from Palatine Hill
Thanks Cozy, for taking us along on a bit of your exciting Roman adventure! We love hearing about SLOCA families connecting with history while traveling.
If your family is taking a trip sometime this year (or has recently) and you have a Magical Moment to share on the blog, please email us and tell us about it!
