Day 6: A Sunday Flea Market, A Random Encounter, Lots of Cats, and Two Churches

Shopping at the Porta Portese flea market.

Every Sunday morning in Rome, the big Porta Portese flea market is held. It used to be a huge outdoor emporium of furniture, housewares, and antiques but these days it's overrun with street vendors selling cheap clothing, bags, scarfs, etc. I never went when I was at the Centro, but I thought it would be fun to experience it. So Lisa and I hopped a bus from in front of our hotel and headed down to check it out. The flea market is notorious for the crowds and the pick-pockets who take advantage of these crowds. In fact, on the bus ride, we saw a man hand his wallet to his wife to put in her zippered purse - and he was Italian!

The flea market takes place along the Via Portuense in Trastevere just past the Porta Portese gate in the old city wall. It runs for a mile or so along this street, but Lisa and I only walked through the first 2/3 of a mile or so before heading back. It was enormous but a lot of what was for sale was, as I said, cheap clothing and the like. In the center of the market there were a few antique and book dealers and we poked through their stalls. In the end, though, the only thing we purchased were some beads for a project Lisa wants to do. (We also avoided any pick-pockets!) It was quite an experience; as Lisa noted, there were some tourists, but probably 80% of the people we saw shopping were Italians. It was an interesting window into the weekly routine of a certain kind of Roman.

Cat!

After the flea market, we took tram from Trastevere back into the city center. Originally, I had planned for us to go to Ostia on Sunday, but since we had done that the day before, we now essentially had a free day. We decided to take advantage of the nice weather by doing some shopping in the Campus Martius area before visiting a few churches. The tram line ends at Largo Argentina so, naturally, Lisa wanted to visit the cats. The cat sanctuary itself was open so we went down into it, met some of the volunteers who run the place, and met lots of cats. On our way in, we also met one of Lisa's students, Laura. We knew she was doing a summer study abroad trip to Rome while we were there, but we hadn't planned on meeting her. It was quite unexpected to randomly run into her at the cat sanctuary and I'm sure she was just as surprised as we were!

The return to Piazza Navona.

Lisa and I then got take-out sandwiches from a little hole-in-the-wall place near the Pantheon and ate them as we walked to the Piazza Navona, the long oval-shaped piazza built on the remains of the first-century AD Stadium of Domitian. If you remember, this was one of the first places we visited in Rome last year and so it's one of Lisa's favorite parts of the city. We got gelato as we walked around the piazza on a sort of Sunday stroll, marveling at how many more people there were here than when we visited in November of 2011.

Galleria Alberto Sordi.

We did a little shopping as we walked to the Via del Corso and we also went into the Galleria Alberto Sordi, an early 20th-century shopping mall. From there, we took a bus (after a very long wait) towards the Termini train station. We got off the Piazza della Repubblica, a huge circular piazza with a modern fountain in the center. This piazza is built on the outline of a semi-circular exedra of the ancient Baths of Diocletian. On one side of the piazza is the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martiri, a church I had never been to before. It's a 16th-century church designed by Michelangelo by reusing some of the rooms of the Baths of Diocletian. He even kept eight of the original granite columns that were in the baths. It's an amazing reuse of space and, even though it dates from the Renaissance, it gives a pretty clear picture of the grandeur of the ancient baths - the size of the rooms, the height of the ceilings, and even the wealth of colored decorations.

Ancient baths or Renaissance church?

Ancient baths or modern piazza?

Santa Maria Maggiore.

Following that, we walked to the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, on the way, eating a slice of watermelon we bought from a food cart. Santa Maria Maggiore is just a little south of the train station on the Esquiline Hill. It's one of the papal basilicas in Rome, which means it's technically sovereign territory of the Vatican and is patrolled by Vatican guards, not by Italian police. The original building was constructed in the fifth century AD and while it's been expanded and renovated several times since then, it still maintains its original layout. It really is very much like an ancient Roman basilica (buildings the Romans used as law courts, primarily). It has a flat ceiling and three long parallel aisles with very few side chapels. This is in contrast to later churches which are frequently built on a cross plan.

Thirteenth-century mosaic.

Bernini's simple tomb.

Because it was Sunday, we ducked into a chapel for the end of a vespers service then quickly looked around the church before they kicked everyone out for 6 o'clock mass. There are some beautiful 13th-century mosaics in the apse, along with a few of the original fifth-century mosaics. Also, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (who created many of the sculptures we saw in the Galleria Borghese and who created much of Baroque Rome) is buried there, near the altar with a very simple grave marker, very different from the huge marble statues he sculpted. Lisa declared this to be her favorite church because it included a free bathroom she could use!

Santa Maria Maggiore.

We decided to have dinner in Trastevere and we waited an extremely long time for a bus. Finally, we just gave up and took the Metro back to our hotel's neighborhood. We couldn't have dinner at the place we'd eaten the last two nights because they closed at 8 on Sundays so we found another place just off the Via Cola di Rienzo to eat. It was more corporate feeling than other places we ate and the food wasn't quite as good, making this one of the few dud restaurants we picked during this trip. On the other hand, we were hungry and cranky so we had to eat somewhere.

The restaurant had the Roma-Lazio championship match on TV. Lazio won, which meant on our walk back to the hotel we were passed by lots of cars and Vespas honking and waving big blue Lazio flags. We even heard them honking once were inside our room, but we were both so tired, it didn't keep us up. I think our days full of museums, sights, walks, and bus rides had caught up to us.

Coming up next: another new hotel, a day of churches, a bus break-down, and a 12th-century church built on top of a 4th-century church built on top of a 1st-century Roman house.

Day 5: A Strange Breakfast, Ostia Antica, and a Power Plant Turned Museum

We began Saturday morning with a rather odd breakfast at the bed and breakfast. It consisted of a slice of cold pizza, a pastry, a ham sandwich, and a cheese and meat tray. Massimo wasn't there (we learned later his daughter was at some sort of summer camp and he went to see her play soccer this weekend) but another employee served us. It was a very carb-heavy breakfast - no fruit, no yogurt, no juice. We hoped this was an aberration, but sadly, it turned out to be the same breakfast every day. It really soured us (especially Lisa) on the place.

Street in Ostia.

My original plan for Saturday had been to get out of Rome by taking a bus to Palestrina, a hill town about 25 miles east of central Rome which houses a huge first-century BC Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia built on a series of terraces going up the hill. While at the Centro, I had taken a field trip and thought it was a very cool site and I wanted to go back to see 1) if it was worth taking students to and 2) if so, how easy it was to get there using public transportation. However, Lisa and I learned that the museum pass no longer covers these outlying sites (and the cost of transportation to get there), making it seem rather expensive. I figured that if we had to pay about 30 euros a piece to get there and back, it wasn't worth asking students to pay that much when I wasn't completely convinced it was a hugely important site. So I changed our plans. Instead of heading east to the hills, we would head southwest towards the ocean and visit Ostia, the port of ancient Rome near the mouth of the Tiber River which was largely constructed in the first and second centuries AD and now is a sizable abandoned site with lots of reasonably well-preserved buildings.

Cupid and Psyche.

To get there, we walked to the closest Metro station and as we did, I noticed Lisa and I were walking against the flow of pedestrians. I couldn't figure out why until I realized that the Metro stop we were headed to is also one of the closest stops to the Vatican, meaning we were fighting against all the tourists headed there for their Saturday morning! After taking the Metro a few stops, we switched to a small regional train (which is really just a glorified above-ground Metro line) that runs out to the beach and stops about a quarter-mile from the entrance to the Ostia site. The city was founded in the fourth century BC and its growth really followed the growth of Rome. The Bay of Naples, far to the south, offered the Romans a beautiful natural harbor and much of the goods coming in and out of Rome passed through Naples, but in the late Republic (first century BC) and the early Empire (first and second centuries AD), the Romans built and dredged man-made harbors at Ostia in order to reduce the distance goods (especially food) had to travel to get to the city. The more people lived in Rome, then, the bigger Ostia became as the landing point for Rome's food supply. As the population of Rome declined at the end of the empire, there was less need for a major port and the site was gradually abandoned until by the sixth century AD, it was just a ruined city with no inhabitants, the marshes and malarial mosquitoes slowly taking over. Fortunately, the marshes have now been drained, malaria was wiped out in Italy in the 1970s, and Ostia is now a fascinating place to see how everyday life would have functioned for the Romans.

Public restrooms, ancient Roman style.

Lisa and I started by walking into the center of the site to the museum, which houses a number of statues and funerary monuments from Ostia. Because Ostia was a port, it attracted merchants and sailors from throughout the Mediterranean and so there are a number of temples and statues of gods from Egypt and Asia in Ostia, like Attis and Isis. There's also a nice statue of Cupid and Psyche, one of Lisa's favorite sculptural themes. After the museum, we had lunch at the cafe next door (it was so-so) and then started exploring the site.

Mosaic from the Piazzale degli Corporazioni.
This guy apparently sold grain.

Ostia was a town of a couple thousand people and so the site is big enough that you could spend a whole day wandering around it - and I did, while at the Centro! There were other things we wanted to do in Rome that day, though, so we limited our visit to just a few of the main sight, like the Forum, a set of public baths, the public bathrooms just off the Forum, a dining hall for an ancient businessman's association, and the reconstructed theater. There's also a cool place called the Piazzale degli Corporazioni (Plaza of the Corporations). This was a large square surrounded by colonnaded offices. In front of each office is a mosaic depicting what that merchant shipped or sold - grain, fish, timber, etc. Ancient branding in action!

Theater at Ostia.

Ancient sculpture, modern machinery.

Although the day had started off sunny, the wind had picked up, the clouds had rolled in, and it had started to sprinkle so it was a good thing we were wrapping up our visit. We took the train back to Rome and walked through the wind and sprinkles about a half-mile from the station to the Montemartini Museum, my favorite museum in Rome. The building is the original electrical power plant for the city, built in the 1900s. It was decommissioned in the 1950s and in the late 1990s, while the Capitoline Museum was undergoing restoration work, they temporarily moved a lot of their collection of ancient sculptures to display in the old power plant. It was such a success that they decided to turn it into a permanent museum after that. So today you can walk along the huge early 20th century diesel turbines while admiring first century BC sculpture. It's a very cool juxtaposition, I think.

Fortuna Huiusce Die.

There are lots of interesting statues in the museum, but there are two that stand out for us. Lisa's favorite was the fragments of the colossal statue of Fortuna Huiusce Die ("Fortune of This Very Day") from a temple dedicated to her in the Largo Argentina (the place where all those cats live, if you remember our previous entries). It dates back to the second century BC and, as you can see from the pictures, it really is huge! My favorite ancient statue of all time is in this museum. It's a state of a Muse that stood in one of the public gardens during the early Empire. I love that she's wrapped up in her cloak with this beautifully dreamy but content expression on her face. I think it's amazing.

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam?
Nope, just Aaron and a statue.

Aaron and his favorite statue.

By the time we left the museum, the sun had come out again, but it was still rather chilly. We a took a direct bus back to our hotel, did some more window shopping along the Via Cola di Rienzo then went to dinner at the same restaurant we had eaten at the night before - it was just that good! When we walked in, it was clear it was a Saturday night as the place was packed. The waiter said he no table for us, but if we came back in about twenty minutes at 8:10, he'd have something. We walked back across the street to our hotel, then back to the restaurant at 8:10 and, sure enough, there was an empty table waiting for us. As the night before, the food was delicious and the place was mostly Italians. It was loud, boisterous, and everyone was having a great time. (As Lisa noted, this is in contrast to many of the restaurants we went to in France, where everyone was always quiet and subdued.) We also saw the waiter turn away other people who were looking for a table; we're convinced that the only reason he told us to come back later was because he recognized us from the night before. I guess it helps to be regulars, even for just two nights!

Bath art in Ostia - naked Aphrodite!

Coming up next: A gigantic flea market, a random encounter with a former student, a leisurely Sunday in the Campus Martius, and the beginning of the "church extravaganza."

Day 4: A Bus Strike, A New Hotel, the Galleria Borghese, and Lots of Sun

Castel Sant'Angelo.

Friday was one of the nicest days we had weather-wise. It was sunny all day and, while windy at times, pleasantly cool. Unfortunately, we hit a huge snag in our plans almost immediately: a bus strike! We checked out of our convent-hotel in the morning, walked to a bus stop that would get us close to our new hotel, and were told by a passing Italian gentleman that there were no buses running. We didn't entirely believe him, because we had seen a different bus running down our street about fifteen minutes before. So we walked to a different stop where a couple of nuns were waiting. Again, a passer-by informed us there were no buses. We tried to get more information by asking a guy in a convenience store, but he had no idea. We walked back to the hotel and asked the desk clerk about it; he didn't seem to know if there was one or not, but he assumed, based on what the passers-by had said, that it was true. He offered to call a cab for us, but the line (naturally) was busy. While we were back at the hotel, we told him that we were thinking about leading a student group that would stay there next summer and he brought out the nun manager who was very kind and who showed us some "apartment-style" rooms we could use. These were a suite of four triple rooms with two shared bathrooms. This helped give us an even better impression of the place - not that it was low to begin with!

After that, we headed to the nearest taxi stand. It's very difficult to hail taxis on the street in Rome; most of them wait at designated taxi parking areas until they get a dispatch call or until someone shows up who wants a cab. Naturally, on a day with a bus strike, there were no cabs there, but there was a call box with a button we pushed. About ten minutes later, a cab showed up, driven by a rather diminutive grizzled old Italian man. He took us north to our new hotel, in the Prati neighborhood, between Castel Sant'Angelo and St. Peter's Basilica.

The new hotel was a bed and breakfast on the fifth floor of an old building that housed a number of law-offices. The very friendly owner, Massimo, greeted us and proceeded to give us all kinds of information about Rome, much of it stuff we already knew, having been there before. But he gave us some new information, too, including shopping and dining recommendations in the area. The room was quite comfortable and clean, but in the end, we didn't enjoy our stay as much as at the first place because of the breakfast (which you'll hear about in the next entry) and because the cleaning woman re-arranged most of our stuff and even seems to have gone through one of our bags!

Palazzo di Giustizia.

Our original plan for the day had been to visit the Castel Sant'Angelo in the morning and the Galleria Borghese museum in the afternoon. The Galleria Borghese requires that you book your tickets in advance and you're only allowed in at the designated time you've reserved; our tickets were for 3 pm. Thanks to the bus strike, our morning was pretty much shot and we were looking at about an hour walk to the Galleria Borghese. So we modified our plan - we skipped the Castel Sant'Angelo and started walking towards the Galleria Borghese. Along the way, we stopped for a take-out lunch of sandwiches and ate in the Piazza Cavour, a big park in front of the Palazzo di Giustizia, the seat of Italy's Supreme Court. It's a huge, grandiose, overly-baroque building constructed in the late 19th century, following the proclamation of Rome as the capital of the newly united Italy.

"Welcome to Rome!" says Pope Sixtus V.

Following lunch, we crossed the Tiber and came into the Piazza del Popolo, a large round piazza that marks the old northern gate in the third-century AD walls (now almost totally gone from this part of Rome). Because it was the major entrance to the city for medieval and Renaissance pilgrims coming from the north (which really means from every in the world except southern Italy!), a 16th-century pope had a huge Egyptian obelisk moved from the Circus Maximus to this piazza as a sort of "welcome to Rome sign." However, the obelisk was surrounded by fencing when we were there because authorities were setting up for a big political rally to be held later in the day. You see, local elections happened on Saturday and so Friday was the last day of campaigning. We had seen signs throughout town advertising rallies in various parts of Rome on Friday afternoon and Massimo had informed us about the elections. He also informed us of one other big piece of news in Rome for the weekend: Sunday was the final match for the Italian soccer championship and the two teams playing were Roma (Rome's team) and Lazio (the team from the region immediately surrounded Rome). These are two big rivals (imagine Bears-Packers or Ohio State-Michigan or Steelers-Browns) so their normal matches are a big deal; a championship match for all the marbles was such a big deal that the police originally didn't even want them to play the match in Italy because of safety concerns! In the end, though, the clubs won out and they played Sunday night in the old Olympic stadium from the 1960 games.

Galleria Borghese.

Lisa's dream car in the Villa Borghese.

Anyway, we continued our walk towards the museum by climbing the stairs up the Pincian Hill, from where we got some nice views overlooking the Piazza del Popolo. There's a huge park on the Pincian Hill (the Villa Borghese) which surrounds the Galleria Borghese and is the remnant of the suburban estate of the 17th-century Cardinal Scipione Borghese. It's now quite a pleasant park and we threaded our way through joggers, bikers, Segway-ers, and even walked around some sort of large equestrian fair. We also saw four twenty-something Italian men barrel down a steep hill on little metal go-carts and then bail out just before hitting a tree. It was quite amusing and a very nice day to stroll through a park.

"This is the best idea I've ever had!"

Pool in the gardens behind the Galleria Borghese.

The Galleria Borghese is located at the back of the park and we got there in time to collect our tickets and get inside for our 3 pm visit. Most of the collection was created by Cardinal Borghese. He was an early patron of the great sculptor Bernini and a collector of Caravaggio's paintings. Unfortunately for you, we couldn't take pictures inside (although we did see one rather boorish looking tourist walk right up to the sculptures and repeatedly snap pictures on his iPhone, hindering other people's ability to see them; we kept hoping a security guard would chew him out, but none did!). You'll have to be content with some links to the more famous works, like Bernini's Daphne and Apollo and Rape of Proserpina and Caravaggio's Bacchus (which is supposedly a self-portrait). The pictures don't really do justice to the sculptures, however; the high level of detail on them is just astounding.

On the Pincian Hill.

In addition to being unable to take pictures, the other thing about the Galleria Borghese is that your visit is strictly limited to two hours, so we were kicked out 5 and started walking back towards the hotel. On the way, we stopped for gelato (our first of the trip, amazingly) at a cafe in the park and we threaded our way through the Piazza del Popolo again, this time with the rally in full swing. However, the size of the rally seemed dwarfed by the size of the piazza! After crossing the Tiber again, we walked up Via Cola di Rienzo and window-shopped in the many stores. For dinner, we went to a place just around the corner from the bed and breakfast which was recommended by Massimo. It was about half tourists and half locals, the waiter spoke to us almost entirely in Italian, and the food was delicious, continuing our streak of picking good restaurants (in contrast to the last time we were in Rome). It was a good way to end the day.

Coming up next: weird breakfast food, Rome's ruined ancient port city, a 1910s power plant full of ancient sculptures, Aaron's favorite ancient statue, and more rain.

A half-hearted political rally.

The Villa Borghese (apparently a nice spot for a romantic rendezvous,
judging from the couple in the lower left).

Bonus picture: antique Fiat.

Day 3: The Via Appia, the Baths of Caracalla, Ancient Sculptures, and Delicious Food

Circus of Maxentius.

Day 3 was when our jet-lag really hit us. I set an alarm for 6:45 am, but when it went off, I groggily turned it off and we slept for another hour. We therefore had a later and more tired morning than we planned on! Our goal for the morning was to head out from the city center to the ancient Via Appia, the famous Appian Way. This road was one of the first and most important of the ancient Romans' major highways. It ran southeast from Rome, connecting the city to the important towns of southern Italy, including Brundisium, a port on the heel of Italy which was the gateway to the east. The first section of the road was completed in 312 BC and throughout the Roman Republic, it became an important burial area. For the Romans, it was a big no-no to bury people inside the city and so the roads out of any city would be lined with tombs and funerary monuments. Another thing the Via Appia is famous for is the crucifixion of 6,000 slaves along the first 120 miles of the road following Spartacus' unsuccessful revolt in the 70s BC (remember the ending of Spartacus with Kirk Douglas?).

Lisa wins!

There's a fair amount to see along the Via Appia, but it can be difficult to get there using public transportation. The main bus line that runs out that way only operates once every half-hour or so. Therefore, we restricted ourselves to only seeing two sights relatively close to the city: the Circus of Maxentius and the Tomb of Caecilia Metella. We didn't have to wait long for the bus going out and we got off near the third milestone out of the city at the Basilica of San Sebastiano (which apparently has a lot of early Christian catacombs, but we didn't go in) then walked to the Circus of Maxentius. This was actually a complex of buildings consisting of a chariot track, a villa, and a mausoleum built by the emperor Maxentius in the early fourth century AD. He lost a civil war to Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and so this complex was pretty much abandoned after he was defeated. The only part that's really open today is the Circus, with its huge walls, the remains of the starting gates, the emperor's box, the spina (the long line of bricks that runs down the center of the track around which the chariots race), and the victory arch. While it had rained earlier in the morning, it was now just overcast, but the grass which grows over the entire site was quite wet. But we were the only people there in the quiet mid-morning and it was very peaceful - full of birds and flowers, many of which live nowhere else in Rome these days because of all the modern development. Lisa and I walked all the way down the track to the victory arch and back.

Inside the Tomb of Caecilia Metella.

Next, we walked a couple hundred yards further down the road to the Tomb of Caecilia Metella. She was a first-century BC noblewoman who was married to the son of Crassus, the richest man in Rome at the time. Her massive tomb was turned into a fortification in the Middle Ages, so it's now sort of a hodge-podge of things, but we got to see a lot of inscriptions and fragments of funerary monuments that used to line the Via Appia as well as an ancient quarry that originally lay underneath the site, complete with wheel-ruts worn into the stone.

A cat at the Tomb of Caecilia Metella.

The Via Appia Antica.

From there, we continued walking up the road to a cafe recommended by Rick Steves' guide where we got a take-out lunch of sandwiches and cake. We ate the sandwiches as we walked back to the bus stop. Mine was so-so, but Lisa reports that her eggplant, tomato, and cheese sandwich was delicious. We waited about 45 minutes for the bus back into town, part of the time with a family of German tourists. As we got closer to the city, more and more people got on - clearly, a lot of people had been waiting quite a while for this bus! We got off at the Baths of Caracalla, a bit south of the city center, but still well within the ancient city walls. Before we went in, we ate the yummy chocolate cake (it had raspberry filling!) we had bought at the cafe.

The Baths of Caracalla.

Mosaic fragments at the Baths of Caracalla.

The Baths of Caracalla are one of my favorite places in Rome because I'm just amazed at their overwhelming size and the amount of effort that went into building them and the number of people who had to work there to keep them running and the amount of wood burned every day to heat the water inside. These baths were built in the early third century AD by the emperor Caracalla and were among the biggest in Rome. Even though it was cold, cloudy, and spitting rain, Lisa and I spent a couple of hours wandering through the gardens around the outside of the site, then the bath complex itself, admiring the height of the vaults (which were originally over 100 feet tall, although the roofs all collapsed long ago) and the beauty of the preserved mosaic floors. Since I was last there in 2003, they've opened some of the underground tunnels which would have served as storage for the wood to be burned and also general service tunnels. They've put a number of architectural and sculptural fragments down there, some of which are quite interesting. For instance, there a couple of carved marble column capitals, one of which is more detailed than the other. The reason, according to the explanatory sign, is because the detailed one would have been quite visible at about 15 feet high while the other one would have been on top of a column 40 feet tall - and who's going to be able to see the detail at that height? - so the sculptor didn't bother to make it overly detailed.

The Capitoline Museum.

When we finished at the baths, we took another bus back into the center of town and went to the Capitoline Museum, a complex of three buildings on the top of the Capitoline Hill that house a huge amount of ancient Roman sculpture. Like the Vatican Museum, it can be an overwhelming place, so we decided to start by going to the very top and getting coffee and a snack at the terrace cafe. From there, we got some amazing views out over the city of Rome. By this time in the afternoon, the clouds had finally started to break up, the sun was coming out, and while it was rather windy, Rome looked beautiful.

Rome from the Capitoline Museum.

The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Face-off.

Back in the museum, we saw lots of fascinating sculpture and inscriptions. Among the highlights are the second-century AD bronze equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius; the Capitoline Wolf (a sixth-century BC bronze sculpture of the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome; in the Renaissance, little baby Romulus and Remus were added to the ancient sculpture); the Capitoline Venus (one of the most-copied ancient depictions of Venus); fragments of the colossal statue of Constantine (which were under plastic because of construction work going on above them); and the Marforio fountain (a colossal ancient sculpture turned into a fountain in the Middle Ages). Another cool thing about the Capitoline Museum is that the palazzi that house it are built on top of or into several Roman ruins. It's built on top of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus ("Jupiter the Best and Greatest") which was the biggest and most important temple in Rome. It was originally constructed in the sixth century BC but because it was so big and because it was built on top of a tall hill, it was repeatedly damaged by lightening over the years. Today, you can see some of the foundations of the temple inside the museum. Another part of the museum is built into the ancient Tabularium, a long and tall first-century BC building that was the record house of ancient Rome. It's built on the back of the Capitoline Hill facing the Forum so today you can walk through the long gallery and get some great views looking out over the Forum. By the time we saw it - late in the afternoon, with the sun fully out - it was absolutely enchanting.

Constantine's head, under wraps.

One of the nice things about the Capitoline Museum is that it's open late, till 7:45 pm, and we used almost all of that time. Once we left, we walked down the hill and took a bus back to the Monteverde neighborhood to drop off our stuff (we'd made several purchases at the Capitoline gift store!) at the hotel. On the walk from the bus stop to the hotel, we were treated to another great view: a block down from our hotel, the street abruptly plunged down the side of the Janiculum Hill which meant from where we were standing, we could look down the end of the street and see the city center beyond, with sun-colored pink clouds blowing in over the Alban Hill and a full moon above. It was another amazing view in a day full of them.

Good night, Rome!

For dinner, we went to Il Focolare, a restaurant just around the corner from the hotel. There were a few tourists there (including some Germans who were also staying at our hotel) but it was a very local place. Really, that makes sense since we weren't in a very touristy part of Rome. Also, we found that if we went to dinner closer to 8 ("Italian dinner time"), most of the tourists had cleared out by then and the clientele were almost all Italians. At any rate, it was an excellent restaurant. They had a delicious antipasti bar with all kinds of grilled and sauteed vegetables. Lisa had penne all'arrabiata which she said was one of the best she'd every had. I had fettucine alla carbonara (my favorite Roman dish) and it was THE best I'd ever had. For desert, I had tiramisu and Lisa had torrone gelato. It was all fantastic. After savoring this delicious food, we headed back to the hotel to bed.

Coming next time: an inconvenient bus strike, a new hotel, the Galleria Borghese, a political rally, and SUN - all day!

The Forum Romanum from the Tabularium.

Lisa and the Marforio statue.

The Capitoline Venus.

Day 2: Ancient Inscriptions, an Embassy, Ignatius of Loyola, and Lots of Rain

Breakfast!

Our second day dawned sunny but hazy and we started out with a delicious breakfast buffet in the basement of the hotel. This buffet was a highlight of the trip for Lisa and included bread, pastries, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, meat, three kinds of juice, cereal, yogurt, and any kind of coffee you cared to order. (In the end, this expansive breakfast was one of the key factors in convincing us that this was the place to stay with students.)

Baths of Diocletian.

Following breakfast, we took the bus back to the train station to visit the Terme branch of the National Roman Museum that's built into the ruins of the third-century AD Baths of Diocletian, just across the street from the station. These baths were huge and in addition to the museum, a church is built into part of the ruins (which we visited a couple days later) and you can see the outline of part of the external wall of the structure in the round shape of the modern Piazza della Repubblica. The Terme Museum contains primarily ancient inscriptions (many of them funerary monuments or statue bases) discovered in and around Rome, but also a few sculptures. Like all the museums we visited, I hadn't been here since 2003 so I'd forgotten some of the interesting artifacts housed here. For instance, there's a couple of small food bowls with the names of Catiline and Cato scratched onto them and they were campaign material for the elections of 63 BC (Catiline lost and then formed his famous conspiracy which was suppressed by Cicero, who never stopped bragging about it for the rest of his life). There's also a fascinating funerary inscription by a husband for his deceased wife, all about how wonderful she was - but it's almost all phrased as the wonderful ways she helped his political career. On the upper floor, there are some cool-looking funerary reliefs of gladiators and a lot of early Christian and Jewish funerary inscriptions. Also part of the museum is a beautiful cloister (wrongly) attributed to Michelangelo, which now houses a lot of sculptures, but we didn't really have time to walk through there. On the way out, we stopped into one of the mostly-complete rooms of the Baths of Diocletian, which I don't think was open in 2003 when I was last here. It really gives you a good sense of the scale of the structure.

Lisa in the cloister.

A lizard we befriended in the garden of the Terme Museum.

Gladiators!

Discobolus!

We got some take-out sandwiches and pizza from a nearby restaurant and ate lunch in the gardens outside the museum, then crossed the street to the Palazzo Massimo, which houses another branch of the National Roman Museum. This museum mostly houses ancient Roman sculpture, mosaics, and wall-paintings. It's a pretty interesting place in that it tries to tell the history of ancient Rome through sculpture, pointing out how styles change over time and how the people depicted are representative of political changes. Among the many things here are an ancient copy of the famous Discus-thrower statue here, as well as an impressive statue of the emperor Augustus, a very intricately-carved third-century AD sarcophagus (the Portonaccio sarcophagus), some beautiful mosaics, and a lot of fantastic frescoes, including the detailed nature scenes painted in the Villa of Livia (Augustus' wife) in the first century AD.

Frescoes from the House of Livia.

You could spend an awful lot of time in this museum (as you can in almost every museum in Rome!), but we had to cut our visit short because we had a 5 pm appointment at the French Embassy. Now, even though we lived in France last year, you're probably asking, "Why in the world would Lisa and Aaron go to the French Embassy?" The reason is because the embassy is housed in the 16th-century Palazzo Farnese, once home to the wealthy and powerful Farnese family. The palazzo has some lavish interior decoration, including the best Renaissance frescoes outside of the Vatican (according to some people) and it once housed a huge collection of antiquities (although these were all moved to Naples when the last member of the Farnese family married into the royal house of Naples in the 18th century). In the last few years, the French Embassy has begun offering tours of the palazzo, but there's only one English tour a week and only 25 people are allowed in at one time. Because I was curious about the interior decoration, I had signed us up before we left the US. So we now had to get across town to our tour. While there had been a thunderstorm while we were in the Palazzo Massimo, the rain had now stopped, which was a good thing since we ended up waiting almost a half hour for our bus (30 minutes seemed to be our average wait time for buses throughout our stay in Rome).

Waiting for the Palazzo Farnese tour.

We got off the bus in the old Campus Martius area and stopped by the candy store we had spent so much time trying to get to last time we were in Rome. Back then, every time we went by, it was closed, but this time, it was open on our first try! After stocking up on some delicious candy, we walked to the Piazza Farnese and waited around outside the embassy with other American and British tourists - and even some French ones, who were doing the tour in English for some reason. A little before the 5 o'clock start time, a French tour guide came out of the building and read out her list of names of people who had signed up for the tour. She checked the tickets and passports of each of us (although not terribly stringently), but there were two people whose names she didn't call. We all went through the security checkpoint into the building, and she then had a long conversation with these two women at the embassy reception desk. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I think they had mistakenly signed up for a different date. Despite the fact that they had paid and that two additional people on the tour wasn't a huge burden, they eventually were told they had to leave. As Lisa and I discovered last year, if you don't fill out the paperwork correctly, the French generally aren't too pleased!

The tour itself was only about 45 minutes long, but quite interesting, with lots of information about the architectural and artistic history of the building and the Farnese family. As I said, the tour guide was French but she mentioned that she was fluent in Italian. Her English, however, wasn't as good and we could see her visibly struggle to remember English words at certain times. But she was still a pretty good guide and there were two very nice guides-in-training along for the tour who were able to answer our questions. We were allowed to see the entrance to the palace, the garden courtyard, and a couple of the interior rooms. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the palazzo (security reasons - it is an embassy, after all), but here's a link to a picture of the main room we got to see, decorated by Annibale Carracci in the 16th century. It's a beautiful room and it's amazing to think Lisa and I are among the lucky few who have gotten to see it in the last few decades. We were additionally lucky because we were told that sometime this summer, the room will be closed for several years for restoration!

St. Ignatius of Loyola ....

Anti-Protestant propaganda or celebration
of holy sadomasochism?

At the end of the tour, when we exited the palace, the sky threatened more thunderstorms. We didn't really have a plan, so I suggested popping into the Gesù Church, not far from the Palazzo Farnese. It was built in the 16th century as the sort of "home church" of the Jesuit order and so it's filled with all kinds of pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant propaganda pieces, including an amazing statue of the Catholic Church (personified as a whip-bearing nun!) beating up an evil Protestant while an angel tears pages out of one of Martin Luther's books. It's also where Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits) is buried and above the altar containing his coffin is a statue of the man which is only on display for about 45 minutes a day, following the 5 o'clock mass. We didn't realize this when we came in and saw it, but once the sacristan flipped a switch and a painting slowly moved up to cover the statue, we saw what was going on! Again, we lucked into seeing something sort of cool.

Going...

...going....

Gone!

A cat befriending Aaron.

Once we had enough of Jesuit boosterism, we started heading, by foot and by tram, to Trastevere for dinner. Along the way, we stopped outside the Largo Argentina cat sanctuary so Lisa could pet and befriend more cats. She'll add that these cats were more friendly than the one she met at the Markets of Trajan the day before. Just as we were leaving, the rain started, drenching us pretty much head to toe, at least on the side of our body left exposed by the umbrella we tried to share. For dinner, we went to Cacio e Pepe, my old favorite restaurant from my Centro days where we had eaten in November 2011. This time, there were a lot more people there, the food wasn't as good, and being cold and wet put us in a bad mood, so it wasn't quite as enjoyable as last time. Fortunately, by the time we finished eating, the rain had pretty much stopped, even though the damage had been done. We were very glad to catch a bus back up the Janiculum to our hotel and our warm, dry beds.

Lisa befriending a cat.

Coming next time: an abandoned chariot track, Roman-style bathing, lots of ancient sculpture, fantastic views of Rome, a delicious eggplant sandwich, and the best spaghetti carbonara I've ever had.