Tales From My Past - World Cup

Evidently it's time for World Cup Soccer again; I don't pay attention to this, as I've mentioned before. This time around the US news and radio is treating the whole business as some kind of event that I should concern myself with, which itself concerns me. Americans don't care about soccer - that's an established fact - so the media paying this much attention to it makes it seem like they're trying to set the agenda instead of reporting what's happening. It's a slippery slope when reporters set themselves up as arbiters.
   Anyhoo... years ago I happened to be in Italy for a World Cup go-round. Three American ladies and I were in Rome to get footage of Roman stuff for a distance learning Latin class. The first night we got there was the night Italy made the quarter-finals and the Italians went nuts. Bonkers. Cukoo. Pazza. The streets were crazy all night long with Italians on scooters, in cars, on foot, blowing horns and yelling and carrying on. A deafening riot that could have woken the dead.
   I didn't hear any of it because the ladies stuck me with an interior room, one that faced the courtyard, which was hot and close and unventilated. And oh-so-quiet. Score one for me.
   Fast forward ten days, the last day we'd be in Rome. We'd been filming antiquities for so long that I thought I would strangle someone if I saw another piece of marble. We were at the Capitoline Museums for one last night of filming. The place opened at 7 PM on a Tuesday - for some reason - and since in Italy hours of operation are just a suggestion the courtyard was slowly filling up with tourists. 7:05 came and went. 7:10. 7:15. 7:20. This was getting late even by Italian 'standards.'
   We heard a huge roar erupt out of a little tiny Renaissance-sized door at the far end of one of the buildings. The museum docents appeared, all thin little Italian men who had consumed a bit too much wine as they watched their national team make it into the semi-final round just minutes before. They opened the museum and rather cheerfully let us in as down the hill the horn-honking began again.
   One of the ladies I was with needed a shot of some marble busts. The room was filled floor-to-ceiling with Roman busts, but she wanted a shot of the very top row, easily 10 feet off the ground. So she pulled over the docent's stool and stood on it. One of the docents saw immediately and he came over speaking Italian too fast and too wine-slurred for me to understand. I thought for sure he was going to toss us out, maybe call one of the Roman police forces. Or all of them.
   Nope, still flushed with World Cup victory, he put his hands up to steady her. He waited patiently until she got her shot, helped her down, and put the stool back where it belonged.
   In a sense, the World Cup helped keep me from getting arrested in Rome. So I suppose it ain't all bad.
   I gotta tell you, though, even years later, if I never see another piece of Roman sculpture it'll be too soon.