Italy: The bone chapel, the booze, and the heat

As far as home decor, it wasn’t a decision I would make: coffee-colored human bones wrapped into elaborate chandeliers and shoulder blades fixed into hourglasses and wings. Time flies and all that.

I could already sense Wife’s grimace farther down the Bone Chapel in the Capuchin Crypt in Rome — for those wondering what Ikea I was visiting.

It’s designer. It’s European. It’s chic. It’s human.

Knowing Wife, the first symptoms of disgust rippled across her top lip somewhere between the knobby femurs interlocked to form walls and the mummified priests gasping in brown frocks older than most of American civilization.

The stale rooms permeated the nostrils less than expected in a city where air conditioning is a practical joke on American losers like us.

The streets outside stank of sweat and coffee and croissants and the occasional pot of urine and feces — a Morgantonion may feel right at home.

We spent our second morning piling into the Capitoline Museum, where nearly every painting and every statue placed the nudity at eye level, making me feel less like an art aficionado and more like a peeping Tom who’d discovered a glass house.

Wife was not there for the art.

She was there for the vibes, something that 500 different marble versions of the Virgin Mary smiling and doting and breastfeeding just couldn’t provide.

By the time we reached Florence, with its one-car-width cobblestone streets flanked by shoulder-width sidewalks and stuccoed walls, she’d found her element.

Sure, we began our only full day there at another art museum — the Uffizi with Caravaggio, Botticelli, and da Vinci — but we spent the evening in a cooking class, with unlimited reds, whites, and other fancy names for wine.

Never one to let money go to waste, Wife, who isn’t drinking for about the next six months, would switch our glasses like the Indiana Jones of alcohol every time I reached the bottom of a spirit.

By the time I was good and sloshed and considering which glass would be the one that made me peer into the great porcelain abyss, I had tried all manners of stinking cheeses, damn-near raw meats, and moderately decent ravioli made by people who were all quantifiably half as buzzed as I was.

The waiter actually made me sit nearby at the end of the evening to save himself the walk each time I needed refilling.

It only took half the winding roads back to the city for me to quell my somersaulting stomach. The remainder of the journey home had me pondering the nature of my eventual legacy.

Then, I started whining about the heat pressing on my skin like an elephant in a sauna.

If there’s one warning I have for any poor soul considering a trip to Italy in mid-August, just know it’s what I imagine the elevator to Hell feels like and the music isn’t much better.

By the time we floated around to Venice, I had already started considering how difficult it would be to write in Italian and whether they’d hire an American journalist if I convinced Wife to abscond there.

Life felt slower.

People sipped coffees at counters, stink-eyeing tourists as they click-clacked down cobblestone streets with rolling luggage, a cacophony of tourist trash.

To be frank, as soon as it wasn’t me pushing a bag around, I was just as judgey.

The one thing I think I’d miss, though, is the hospitality of home. Nobody smiles at you on the streets or in the cafes.

Even if it’s without teeth, an ear-to-ear grin from a Burke-Caldwellian passing by on the sidewalk can make a day full of deadlines and overprocessed food a bit easier to swallow.