If you can’t stand the heat, keep out of wonderful Rome!

ROME – Heard about the Roman baths like the Terme di Diocleziano (Baths of Diocletian) or the even more famous ruins, the Terme de Caracalla (Baths of Caracalla) on the road to Mussolini’s supercity of the 1930s, EUR? In the latter "bath" they now conduct concerts. This is where the Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras) sang, not to be confused with those Three Terrors whose sorties into song brought two typhoons to Manila – Lina, Fernando and Reyes.

Whenever I pass by the Caracalla baths, dating back to AD 212, I can't help musing how, since they spent so much time in bathing, gossip (tsismis) and debauchery in the Bath, did Rome’s emperors and Caesars find enough time to dry themselves up and conquer the world?

In Rome today, even with the empire gone, you may find yourselves spending more time in the bath. It is hot, hot, hot. The Romans, with their penchant for hyperbole, tell me, "It is the hottest heat wave in 200 years!"

So, if you can’t stand the heat – believe me, it’s cooler in Manila – keep away from scorching Italy.

When we got off our Air France flight from Manila the other day, we found it very hot in the CDG’s Roissy terminal there, too.

As the old ditty goes, gushing about how "I love Paris", you’ll have a chance to love Paris when it sizzles. Thirteen and a half hours on an Airbus 240-300 is taxing enough, but when the hot air bangs you in the face as you descend, you wonder why you didn’t stay home in breezy Metro Manila – except there, the exhaust fumes and smokey mountain pollution (cough-cough) will get you faster than chain-smoking the now-banned cigarettes. (The new law just passed claims cigarettes kill, but those second-hand, junk claptrap and 15-year old kabit buses on EDSA, so blithely tolerated by DOTC’s Larry Mendoza and his boys, are killing you faster.)

We had a pleasant onward flight, though, from Paris to Rome aboard Alitalia (a pleasant surprise, indeed, since the service was excellent and efficient). One thing must be observed of the Italians – they are friendly, gregarious, helpful and kind wherever you may encounter them.

I won’t say the French are surly, suffer from la follie de grandeur and occasional character mauvais, because they are tres charmant even when they don’t wash – but the Italians are the salt of the earth. You encounter other people in Europe – but you know, when you meet Italians (even some who don’t wash too frequently either), you are in the warm embrace of a generous, happy, courteous and caring nation. I kid thee not, having over many decades experienced both the good and the bad in the boot of Italy, sometimes having to give or receive the boot, too, in the process.

There’s an old saying: "Every man (or woman) has two countries – his own and Italy."

Chow on that. The first time you experience a Roman sunset, with the golden orb turning crimson, washed red by tears of reluctant farewell, with the azure blue of the sky transforming into orange, then crimson, and the chariot of the gods dip below the Palatine Hill, yielding the heavenly dome to starry night, you’ll realize that truth.

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Everytime I come to Rome, my heart lifts up. It is not just the Eternal City, as poets hymn it. It is a city where life is lived on the streets, like a theater under the open sky.

Everytime I arrive, my first pilgrimage is not to massive St. Peter’s in the Vatican, like the pious do or the penitents (I won’t say, like Bishop Bacani) undertake.

I go to the Roman Forum (Il Foro Romano) and salute the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum – the elliptical amphitheatre erected by the Emperor Vespasian (who placed a tax on toilets). Contrary to tourist belief, it was called Colosseum, not owing to its huge presence, with 76 numbered entrances and four VIP entrances, but because of a colossal bronze statue of the Emperor Nero which once stood nearby.

So many Christians were put to death there, that Tertullian was moved to exclaim that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christianity."

Not just Christians expired in the sands of the Colosseum, yes, heavily dumped with sand to soak up the blood.

Vespasian’s son Titus inaugurated the place with a three-month marathon of death, wherein about 2,000 gladiators and 9,000 wild beasts lost their lives. Again, the Emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) held games which lasted 123 days in which an encredible number of 5,000 humans perished as well as 11,000 animals. (Remember the movie The Gladiator with Russell Crowe?)

Blood, bread and circuses was how they appeased the plebs, and the Roman mob.

Today, there’s a guy – rather skinny – who’s on "duty" there, attired in Roman centurion garb. For ten euros ($12 or so – how the mighty dollar has fallen! He poses with you for a photograph). If you ask me, he looks like a Moroccan, rather than a Roman, but what the heck.

In its heyday, the Empire extended from Portugal to Damascus, and from Northumberland (England) to Egypt and the Nile (remember Julius the Randy,then Anthony and Cleopatra?) Morocco, then Carthage in Tunisia, in North Africa were part of the Empire, since they were on the Mediterranean Sea which the Romans dubbed mare nostrum (Our Sea). Septimus Severus, one of the Emperors in fact came from North Africa, while Trajan and Hadrian, both, came from the colony which is now Spain. The Roman Empire at its zenith covered 40 provinces (ergo 40 different countries), in which over 50 million people lived consisting of many different races and religions. The vast territory included six time zones. Within the Empire, in Bethlehem to Jerusalem, Jesus lived and died and rose from the dead.

Didn't He say: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’?

Many were absorbed into the empire, like St. Paul., who wore his citizenship proudly like a shielding cloak. It was a source of pride to declare, "Civis Romanus sum!" I am a Roman citizen.

Nowadays, even the manhole covers cast in iron proclaim this pride, "SPQR". Those engraved letters mean, "The Senate and People of Rome" (Senatus populasque Romano). The Romans were obsessed with toilets. Vespasian taxed them, raising money for his massive projects like roads and the Colosseum. The Romans covered their sewers with SPQR. Did they flush? One day, exhausted, their Empire got flushed down the toilet.

But the grandeur lingers on.

Yesterday, the road to the Colosseum was full of newly-weds, having their photographs and movie-reels taken – arriving in fiacres or horsedrawn carriages to approximate, I guess, the Roman war-chariots (à la Ben Hur and Marsala) whose wheel gouges still mar some of the ancient cobblestones and flagstones of the approaches to the old Appian way. Why do grooms bring their brides for that mandatory picture-taking spree in the Colosseum, the Arch, and the area of the Via Sacra which leads to that other site of power, the Foro Imperiali?

Perhaps because the Colosseum was the Empire’s biggest . . . er, erection?

Forgive me. Rome is where both God and the Devil linger. God redeems, the Devil tempts. When you growl, "Get thee behind me, Satan," old Beelzebub resorts to treachery. He inspired La Dolce Vita and dolce far niente. Then he sent in the temptresses, a far cry from the ancient Vestal Virgins. This is where the saying was born, too: "When at first the Devil does not succeed, he sends a woman."

Remember Samson and Delilah? David and Bathsheeba? Judith and Holoferness? They are all in the Holy Book. Lest I run afoul of the anti-male-chauvinists, further this affiant sayeth not. I merely quoted Scripture, as the Devil does.