Leave the crowds
Skip the Colosseum and Vatican on a trip to Rome; go further
ROME — There was no escaping it. Try as one might, there was no way out but to go with the dense flow of sweaty humanity.
This was the Vatican Museum with its endless galleries of some of the finest art Western civilization had ever produced — scores of highlights obstructed from full view by fellow journeymen, many of whom were trying to make the most of a once-in-alifetime experience.
One hapless tourist took pictures of the explanatory panels, unable to stand still and actually read them, before being swept up and moved along, up to the next masterpiece hidden from proper view.
Michelangelo was a visionary genius for painting not only the walls of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, but primarily its ceilings. Over half a millennium later, it does allow for an unobstructed view, however tightly packed the masses are, however tense the neck muscles become.
This was a weekday in early autumn, when travelers in most destinations expect high tourist season to finally give way to a semblance of civility. Not in Rome, not at the Vatican.
It captivated in a few claustrophobic moments the challenges top tourist destinations now face across Europe — be it Amsterdam, Venice, Rome or Belgium’s Bruges.
“Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds,” Mark Twain wrote in his famed travel report through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, “The Innocents Abroad.” With overtourism gripping the great treasures of humanity, it seems a lot of amnesia is in order for memories to truly shine.
But hold on. There is another way, and you don’t even have to give up a visit to a place like Rome.
One day after the suffocating zombie experience at the Vatican Museum, you might be forgiven for furtively looking over your shoulder at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme museum and wonder, “Where is everybody?”
The art is as unbeatable as at the Vatican. Try finding a better 2,000-year-old discus thrower, and wonder how so much human expression could be put in a bronze like the boxer. And here you can circle it from every angle with nary another tourist in sight.
What it comes down to is an acceptance that you might not see every Top 5 attraction in a city or country. But what you will lose in namedropping — “I was at the Uffizi” — you will gain in true travel experience and a sense of adventure to go off the beaten track.
Here’s how that philosophy plays out on a visit to Rome, even if it might sound sacrilegious to some: