Felix was feeling a lot better this morning, so we chose a tame jaunt within the city and we brought a lot of tissues: a trip to the national Etruscan museum, in a splendid palace called the Villa Giulia.

Felix and I first mapped our route, first on the no. 8 tram along viale di Trastevere and across the ponte Garibaldi, then a 280 bus past the Vatican and into the fancy neighborhood called Prati. We walked from the piazza to the Villa Giulia, at the northern edge of the city park called the Giardini Borghese, taking in a couple of major fountains on the way. From the Villa Giulia, we took the no. 3 tram (which turns into a bus part way) all the long way around the city and home.

The Etruscan museum is a collective graverobbers’ trove. Almost everything in it was dug up at some point from a grave, disused temple, or similar archeological site in the area between modern Latina and the center of Tuscany. It’s not all Etruscan: there are heaps of Faliscan stuff as well, including plenty of artifacts with writing on them.

If I get correctly the didactic information in the Etruscan museum, most of the establishment pooh-poohed Etruscan discoveries and excavations in the late 19th century. Tuscany, Umbria, and a big swath of Latium were all dominated by these Etruscan people and their towns for hundreds of years, but it just wasn’t fashionable to dig Etruscan art. (Art historians, like all historians, can seem like goofballs when you read about them a hundred years later.)

This lack of interest in the Etruscans was in spite of the fact that Rome was run by Etruscan kings for a while, and you needed to know Etruscan to get around the Roman region for several hundred years. But, frankly, it sounds like the 19th-century historians weren’t very interested in Rome before the Empire anyway. And they had just weathered a century that was determined to do more damage to Roman art and architecture than anything since mannerism. Maybe even including mannerism, which at least was amusing. If you see something hideous in a nice Roman building, chances are good that it was a 19th-century addition. (The Pantheon, maybe the best building on the planet, at eye level is a collection of such eyesores.)

As for Etruscan art, what’s not to like? The Etruscans went in for funerals and memorial stuff in a big way, and they were really good at making jewellery, bowls, and lamps. We didn’t realize that the safety pin was such a popular item in the 6th century BC.

Also, the Etruscans (and their Faliscian neighbors) clearly liked sculptures of animals. In the museum, we played a treasure hunt to look for dogs, bears, frogs, and logs.

I get the impression that a lot of people go to the Etruscan museum just to visit the Villa Giulia, which has got to be one of the more livable feeling of all the papal pleasure palaces. You can easily imagine Julius marrying off a favorite niece in the central courtyard, with a dance band playing discreetly from the nymphaeum down the stairs.

We had dinner tonight at a restaurant down the street called Paris (for no obvious reason -- it’s mostly basic Roman food). Alaina had a plate of battered and fried things, including some late artichokes and excellent bits of salt cod. Felix had pasta with nothing on it, and I had a plate of raw fish. Esca, in Manhattan, does better crudi, but not as affordably: I got a bunch of medium shrimp, four of the bigger prawns with crunchable claws, some minced squid, and a few slices of maguro. Like everything else I’ve eaten in a Roman restaurant, it was well salted. Before bringing it to the table, the waiter poured a little oil over the plate and added some black pepper.

Gender in Italian

Italian grammatical gender is characteristically straightforward: there are only two genders, and they are marked in the nouns, adjectives, articles, demonstratives, and the number one. Gender is also marked in the third person pronouns, although slightly differently. By and large, you can tell from a noun’s ending what gender it is supposed to be: -a nouns are generally feminine, -o nouns are generally masculine, and there are rules for other common endings like -zione, -à. Also, unlike some of the Romance languages, gender is pretty much never marked in the verbs, except in the participles. And there is nothing like complete set of five gender markings for numbers and verbs that makes Polish so tricky.

But there are a few words -- most of them body parts -- that have crazy gender in Italian. Take an osso, which is just a bone, and masculine in the singular. The plural is ossa, and it’s feminine. It doesn’t feel like a plural, and heaven knows why bones, eggs, and ears should be masculine if you only have one but feminine in the likely case that you have more.

I feel proud every time I use the correct plural when asking for eggs, and I’m sure no Italian speaker will ever notice.

On breaking bones

When I came to Rome, I was wearing a sling on my left arm. I had broke my left collarbone a month prior. This is one of the bones most commonly broken, and I had managed to inflict mine on myself by dumping my scooter at the side of the road right next to my driveway at home. I was avoiding the car that was rocketing around a bend and was in my lane, but they didn’t stop, and I’m sure that I should have been more careful before pulling out.

My experience with a broken collarbone was this: it’s pretty painful at the beginning. For a simple break, in the middle of the bone, the doctors can either install a small plate (usual recovery time, 2 wks) or isolate your arm in a sling and let it heal itself (8 wks). The doctors prescribe narcotics, which I find a worse experience than the pain. I’ve had nightmares, but I’ve never had anything as nightmarish as an afternoon under codeine. Ugh.

And I didn’t sleep for a month. I gather that this is pretty typical. I would get about three hours of interrupted sleep each night, usually sitting up, and sometimes lying on my right side. I watched a lot of The Prisoner. I worked sporadically, and it was tough to keep from grumping at everyone.

My friend Terry also once broke his collarbone (he had the grace and athletic vigor to do so while mountain biking), and his family contend that he was almost unbearable for about a month of sleeplessness. Since I’m grumpier than Terry to start, I was surely whatever is worse than unbearable.

But, for me, things were healing well. At about week 5 everything suddenly improved. Over three days, my arm went from bound against my side to mobile and useful. Six weeks in, I can now sleep on my left side (for a little while) and I can use my left arm from anything that doesn’t involve pushing or heavy lifting. I am pretty sure that push-ups will be in order soon.

So here’s what I’ll tell you, should you break your collarbone: it is really unpleasant for a few weeks, and the sleep deprivation is like having a newborn in the house. But, if it’s healing properly, overnight everything gets better between a month and six weeks.

My collarbone will remain a funny shape, but the doctors say it’s just fine. I have the x-ray pictures with me, in case something happens and I need to go to the hospital around the corner.

Also, I realized once again how great it is to have my extended family taking care of me. Alaina and Felix and Connie were always there to help out when I couldn’t pick something up or when I needed to get dressed.