A Microclimate Under The Tracks?

When I was in Rome last summer, I learned that during the centuries when the Colosseum was all but abandoned, so many species of vegetation grew in it that Domenico Panaroli cataloged them. 

According to some writers and chroniclers, all of those herbs and other plants created micro-climates within the Colosseum's walls.  I don't find that so difficult to believe:  Different parts felt hotter or cooler, depending on the sun, shade and wind, during my visit there.

My commute this morning got met to thinking about the possibility of Colosseum "microclimates".  For one thing, the lane I ride to the Randall's Island Connector winds underneath the tracks on which Acela trains shuttle between New York and Boston.  Those tracks run on a viaduct supported by stone arches that would not look out of place in Rome, or the ancient parts of many other cities in the Old World.

But, more important, I think I rode into a microclimate:

The remanants of yesterday's storm dripped, and rays of sunlight flickered, through the tracks above.  And I pedaled through the "rainbow" you see in the photo.  I didn't see another rainbow anywhere else, nor did any rain fall.  And the sky grew brighter as I neared the college.

Looking Up: A Tourist!

You can usually tell when someone is a tourist:  He or she is looking at all of the stuff (and, sometimes, people) the natives take for granted.

In downtown and midtown Manhattan, they are usually looking up--at the Empire State Building, Liberty Tower and other skyscrapers.  I haven't stopped noticing such things, but I think I've developed some sort of peripheral vision that allows me to look at the spires and other architectural features that are expressions of somebody's reach.

I realize now that in Italy, I must have been as obviously a tourist as someone from North Dakota or Oklahoma is while ambling along Broadway.  Or someone speaking Italian on Mott Street:  Little Italy is all but gone, so that person is more than likely from Milan.

Of course, I could've been taken for a tourist on my appearance alone.  The Italians usually greeted me with a friendly if somewhat deferential "signora", but they could not have seen me as one of their women:  I am taller and lighter than most of them.  Also, my Italian--such as it is--doesn't sound anything like what anyone speaks in "The Boot."  If anything, I probably sound like pure Bay Parkway by way of Asbury Park.

There is one other thing, though, that surely gave me away as a visitor--aside from the fact that I was consulting maps.  You see, I was like all of those gawkers I see in my home town:  I spent a lot of time looking upward.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the skylights in the catacombs' chapels must have turned those early Christians' attentions skyward, i.e., toward the heavens.  I couldn't help but to thin that so much cathedral architecture--internal as well as external--was at least somewhat influenced by a memory, historical as well as visceral, of that:  Worshipers were usually looking up, whether at the altar (which was raised) or the stained glass windows or statues above.

Even when I wasn't in a basilica or some other such place, it seemed that I couldn't look anywhere but up.  And, yes, my gaze was often turned above me even as I was navigating those Roman streets and traffic circles.

Was Eddy Mercx thinking about something like that when he told George Mount that if he really wanted to learn about bike racing, he had to go to Italy?