Return to Rome!

That's right, Lisa and I returned to Rome in late May. Why in the world would we do that (other than the fact that we enjoy Rome so much)? Well, we secured some funding from our employer to take a planning trip as we organize as study abroad course in Rome for next summer. As you'll hopefully see from this blog, we did a lot of work but had a lot of fun at the same time. And, if you read our previous blog about our life in France, you'll know that most of the fun trips we took during those nine months involved what most people would consider work: going to museums, visiting old churches and ruins, taking notes on interesting artistic and architectural details we saw, and not a lot of down time to shop or sit in cafes and relax. After all, we can do that in the US, but Europe is our chance to see really cool old stuff!

Rome, ancient and modern.

So we packed our bags, left Minnesota for a wedding in Chicago, then flew from there to Rome. We flew Alitalia, which was a perfectly pleasant experience, but we didn't get the amazing food, repeated offers of free wine and beer, and the individual seat-back movie screens that we got when we flew flew to France on Scandinavian Airlines. The overnight flight arrived in Rome about 9 am and we took the non-stop train from the airport into central Rome, about a half-hour ride. At the Termini train station, we stopped by the tourist office to buy the Roma Pass, a three-day pass which gave us free use of Rome's public transit network and some museum discounts. After stopping by a bank to get some cash (from our old and still-active French bank account!), we took the bus from Termini across town, over the Tiber, and up the Janiculum Hill to our hotel. The bus ride was interesting because two middle-aged British tourists rode much of the way with us. It became clear they had just gotten on a bus without really knowing where it was going. When we passed the Colosseum, they decided to get off, but at the next stop, they decided it was too far to walk back to the Colosseum - so they stayed on the bus! Finally, they got off in Trastevere, across the Tiber River from central Rome, but it didn't seem like they had any clue where they were nor did they have any plan! The only reason I knew where we were going is because our hotel was in the same neighborhood (Monteverde) where I lived when I studied in Rome in 2003. The bus from the train station up to Monteverde is the same number and makes the same stops as it did ten years ago, thankfully.

We got the Hotel Villa Santa Maria around 1, checked in, and freshened up a little. The hotel was a lovely convent guest house. Since our trip was meant to organize the study abroad trip, we stayed in a couple of different places where we could stay with students - they took group reservations, have some kind of a meeting space, have no curfew, and include breakfast. This particular guest house was different than where we stayed in 2011 in that it seemed very much like a hotel owned by nuns. There was a guy in a suit at the front desk 24 hours a day, we only saw one nun while we were there, and they had an elevator. But it still wasn't anything fancy, which helps make these a cheap lodging option in Rome, for us and for our potential students.

Villa Doria Pamphili.

We then headed out for lunch from Pizzeria da Simone, just a couple blocks from the hotel and the place where I ate many a lunch when I studied at the Centro. We got some pizza and suppli and walked up the street to the Villa Doria Pamphili, a huge park on the grounds of an old Renaissance villa. I had been looking forward to this for weeks - pizza from my favorite pizzeria and a picnic lunch in a beautiful park. Unfortunately, it was a cool overcast day, something that would end up being a common occurrence during our stay. Still, it didn't put too much of a damper on our lunch.

The Markets of Trajan.

The first cat of the trip.

Now, we had just that morning gotten off of an eight-and-a-half-hour plane flight spanning seven time zones and were really feeling the effects of that. One of the keys to fighting jet lag, though is to try to get your body on your new local time as quickly as possible, which means resisting the temptation to go to sleep when you arrive. Instead, you should try to stay up all day and go to bed only when it's actually night time. To that end, I had planned for us to go to a couple of small museums that first day to force us to be active and keep awake. (As a side note, I had planned quite a regimented and, as it turned out, overly ambitious itinerary for us, incorporating as many sights and museums as possible for us to evaluate their usefulness as part of a study abroad course.) So we took a bus back into the city center to visit the Museum of the Imperial Fora. These fora were a series of individual expansions of the Roman Forum built by in the first and second centuries AD by several different emperors. The museum itself is built into the Markets of Trajan, part of Trajan's Forum constructed by that emperor in the early second century AD. The markets were essentially a three-level shopping mall ringing one side of Trajan's Forum and built into the side of the Quirinal Hill. The museum houses some sculptural and architectural fragments from the various fora and does a good job of reconstructing what these fora would have looked like in ancient times. You can also walk through the markets and get some great views of Trajan's Forum. Plus, Lisa met her first cat of the trip there!

The Museum of the Imperial Fora.

Part of the index finger from a colossal statue of Augustus
(with Lisa's fingers for comparison!).

Santa Maria di Loreto. Again, why the papoose?

After we finished at the museum, we stopped in the church of Santa Maria di Loreto behind Trajan's Forum so Lisa could see the "Mary in a papoose" statue she's so fascinated by. We still have no explanation for why she's depicted that way in various churches dedicated to Maria di Loreto!

The Crypta Balbi - but what exactly is it?

From there, we walked through drizzle across the always-busy Piazza Venezia to the Crypta Balbi, one of the four branches of the National Roman Museum. In the 1980s, excavations here uncovered a colonnade that was part of the Theater of Balbus (constructed in the late first century BC) as well as medieval occupations of the site. The museum allows you access to these archaeological remains and also houses artifacts from the excavation as well as the Museum of Medieval Rome, which documents the transformation of ancient Rome in the depopulated, church-heavy early medieval city. The archaeological remains come with no explanation; an employee opens them up for you, you wander around them, then the employee takes you on to the next room. It was very unclear what we were seeing, sort of like the underground crytoporticus we saw in Arles last year. The medieval museum was interesting, full of inscriptions and paintings from early medieval churches and explanations of the reuse of urban space. Unfortunately, it was hard to absorb much of this information given how tired and jet-lagged we were! We also decided that, as interesting as this museum might be to us, it's not worth our students' time to go there when they'll have twelve or fourteen days in Rome.

At this point, we decided we just couldn't stay awake any longer so we took a bus back to the hotel and went to bed around 8. We weren't even hungry for dinner; our bodies clearly had no idea what time it was and this jet-lag would stay with us for a few more days.

Coming next time: a delicious breakfast buffet, lots of ancient inscriptions, over-the-top 16th-century anti-Protestant propaganda, cats, a visit to the French Embassy, and torrential downpours!