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.