Roman Beaches

You know, generally, in life, I'm a fan of the beach. There's plenty of sun and when you get hot, there's plenty of water. You need a copious (man, I haven't used that word in a while. Copious.) amount of sunscreen to make it through, but really, it's a lovely time to loose yourself in a book or nap or people watch.

The thing about the Roman beach, though, apart from the black-grey sand (seriously, the beach looked like pepper and I was quite surprised), is that it's a bit of a trip from the city out to the coast. We probably spent a good three hours getting to our vacation away from our vacation, spending only a euro but, in terms of stress, should strain and sweat, we might as well have taken a cab.

It was wonderful to be at a beach town, though. They have McDonalds and little beach shops and, most importantly, easy access to the beach. It was literally right across the road from our hostel. We spent most, almost all, of our few days at the Roman beach out on the beach, occasionally swimming out in the sea but mostly worshipping the sun god or hiding from his anger under our rented umbrella. I was a little jealous of the old Italian man who walked the beach setting up chairs and taking down the left-over umbrellas, impervious to the sun's rays as he shuffled over burning sand, pipe in mouth and trash collector in hand.

The amount of people on the beach was the surprising thing to me. You probably think at this point that all I do is walk around with my mouth open staring in wonder, but honestly, once you get past the different colored sand, a beach is a beach. The people are what make it different. The beach proved the assertion that Europeans are just a lot more comfortable with nudity than Americans in general are, but other than that, it was just full of families, groups of friends, couples, solo sun bathers, everyone enjoying the same stretch of potential glass.

But the beach was full. Even on Sunday morning (it was just so much easier to stay at the beach than to try to go to a morning service in town and anyway, once you've seen one simple morning mass, you've seen them all; plus, the pope was out of town, so there was no way he was holding mass in the city anyway), people swarmed the sand, distinctly not going to church. Maybe it shouldn't surprise me, but I figured the country that had a guard at the door of their basilica making sure your skirt wasn't a few inches too short would have empty beaches on a Sunday morning.

Still, you could say we were worshipping something. I can understand why ancients would have worshipped a sun god. Maybe the sunlight is particularly powerful because of our ruinous areosol practices, but anything that can turn my skin red from such a distance, high in the sky, deserves my attention at the very least. It's just simpler- no doctrines to listen to people argue over, no deeply packed symbolism to try to uncover, no potenital mistakes to be made.

Just laying on a beach, worshipping the sun.