Day 9: Florence

Walking in Florence.

Wednesday, we returned to Florence, almost a year to the day since we had been there with our friends Suzy and Dan. We scarfed down another quick breakfast at the convent and caught our train. We didn't have cheap business-class seats on this one, so there was no free snack and it was a lot more crowded. We passed through the northern part of the Apennine Mountains and (unlike the train to Naples) went through a lot of long tunnels.

We got to Florence around 10 without much of a plan, and that was fine by us. After eight days of visiting museums and ancient sites, thinking about how to plan a study-abroad trip to Rome, Florence was our relaxing treat to ourselves. There's very little ancient in Florence and so we wouldn't take students there as part of our trip. It was nice to have a day "off the clock," as it were.

Il Papiro.

The River Arno from the Ponte Vecchio.

Much of our time in Florence was spent shopping, both window and real. We went into a lot of candy and chocolate stores, including Venchi, one of Lisa's favorites. We stopped in several leather stores (something Florence and Tuscany is known for), looking for boots for Lisa, which we didn't find, and a leather satchel type bag for me, which we eventually did find after lots of looking and thinking. (I have to state here that yes, it's sort of a man-purse, but quite frankly, I think it's a useful bag to carry while traveling in Europe, as I found both last year and on this trip. Every day, I carried around a water bottle, a small travel umbrella, two or three guidebooks, a map, a notebook to record sites and museum artifacts useful for the class, and sometimes even snack food. Before Florence, I had been using a little canvas messenger bag of Lisa's and I was looking for a classier upgrade to use. I'm sure this bag will be handy next year, too, since I'll be carrying all the stuff I listed above, plus lecture notes, as we lead students on walking tours every day.) In one leather store, the saleswoman talked to us mostly in Italian, which we understood, and Lisa tried to answer in Italian, but I think it sounded like a lot of Latin. Regardless, the saleswoman knew what Lisa meant!

Gold store on the Ponte Vecchio.

We also looked into the windows of all the gold and jewelry stores lining the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge over the Arno River. It's amazing how detailed and various the objects on sale were. We stopped at Il Papiro, too, a nice paper store that sells marbled paper handmade in Florence.

Ribollita.

Gelato at Grom.

In addition to the shopping, we also enjoyed the food. One of the main reasons we returned to Florence was because Lisa liked where we ate last year. For lunch, we returned to the Tratoria Marino where we had eaten dinner with Suzy and Dan and where they served the delicious ribolitta soup. The same two waiters were working there and the ribolitta was a little different than we remembered, but still tasty, especially on a cool but sunny spring day. As a mid-afternoon snack, we got a sandwich from Ivo, the wonderful panino place Dan had found for our lunch last year. We also got gelato twice, once at Grom (one of the best places in Florence) and once at Venchi on our way returning to the train station.

Palazzo Vecchio.

The only sight-seeing we did was to return to the Duomo to take some pictures inside. Otherwise, it was almost an entire day of nothing but leisurely strolling, shopping, and eating. It was a very relaxing day and a nice last full day in Italy. As our colleague in the Italian program told me before we came, Florence just seems like such a relaxed, slower-paced place after the chaos of Rome.

The Duomo of Florence.

Interior of the Duomo.

The Victor Emmanuel Monument (with construction in the foreground!).

Our train back to Rome got in a little after six and we returned to the convent to settle our bill. From there, we headed back over to Trastevere for our last dinner and chose a restaurant right next door to where we had eaten the night before. The food was good, but there was only one waiter working and, although not a terribly large place, it was pretty full. That meant the service was painfully slow and we saw numerous people leave before getting their menus because they were tired of waiting. That also meant we didn't finish till quite late. To get back to the hotel, we took the first bus we saw heading to the city center and changed at the Piazza Venezia. It was a long-about route, but we didn't want to wait for the direct bus. Plus, the second bus took us past the Victor Emmanuel Monument, the Imperial Fora, the Colosseum, the Palatine, and the Circus Maximus, all of them light up. It was a nice tour of the major sites of Rome on our last night in the city.

Coming next: the trip home.

Day 8: Pompeii

Tuesday morning, we scarfed down a quick breakfast of bread and coffee at the hotel, then raced to the train station (via Metro) to catch our high-speed train to Naples. When I bought the tickets on-line, the cheapest option was business class, which meant we got slightly larger seats that normal and free snacks and beverages. We could have gotten a free newspaper, too, but because the staff could tell we were Americans, they didn't offer us their Italian newspapers. The hour-and-ten-minute-long train ride was pleasant and it was nice to see the countryside of the Alban Hills and Apennine Mountains roll by.

Our only view of Naples, from the train station.

I was a bit apprehensive about returning to Naples. I had been there when I studied at the Centro as part of a week-long trip to Campania (the area surrounding Naples). We didn't stay in the city and most our field trips were to ancient sites, but we spent about two days total at the museums and churches of Naples. I heard plenty of times then, and have read since, about how many pick-pockets and thieves are there, how dangerous it is, and how one always has to be on one's guard. Unfortunately, the only way to get to Pompeii without a car is to go through Naples. On the other hand, we didn't leave the train station but transferred from our train from Rome to a local commuter train to get to Pompeii. At the same time, we saw quite a few beggars hanging around the train station, including a rather well-dressed teenage girl hanging out at the ticket window asking for change from everyone who bought a ticket (including me). Still, I never really felt unsafe, but we were always very aware of our surroundings.

Forum of Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background.

We had about an hour wait in the train station so we picked up a couple of to-go sandwiches at a little cafe in the shopping concourse area to have for lunch once we got to Pompeii. They ended up being delicious, much better quality than we expected! The commuter train to Pompeii (the Circumvesuviana) was extremely crowded - we had to stand for the entire 45 minute ride. Naturally, almost everyone on the train got off at Pompeii, meaning there was little turnover of seats before we got off. Despite the run-down nature of the train and the large number of people on it, the ride was very scenic, wedged as it was between the large and beautiful Bay of Naples on one side and Mount Vesuvius on the other. On the way to Pompeii, we passed the stop for the excavations at Herculaneum, one of the other places I wanted to try to visit. However, the stop looked like it was in the center of town and since I didn't really have a clear idea of how to get from the station to the excavations, I decided we could skip that part of the day and devote our time to Pompeii.

Cast of a victim of the eruption of 79 AD.

The train stops about fifty yards from the entrance to the archaeological site of Pompeii and we got there around 11:30, bought our tickets, and walked into the site to have a discreet picnic lunch near the official cafeteria. Following that, we joined the throngs of tourists and school groups taking advantage of the nice day and wandering all over the dead city. It's a pretty impressive site in its completeness: an entire town that once held about 20,000 people completely buried by ash and rubble from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. (Fun fact; Vesuvius is still active and is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years; 1944 was the most recent eruption. I told Lisa it was still active and that fact made her rather nervous, especially when we heard loud booms - probably from a quarry - shortly after I said that!) The site was rediscovered in the 18th century and excavations were carried on more or less continuously into the late 20th century, although now a moratorium has been imposed on new excavations in order to use the money to preserve what has already been exposed. Since it really is a small town, you could spend days wandering the site and going into as many buildings as possible (although many are now closed to tourists to prevent further degradation to the site). In the few hours we had to visit, here are some of the more interesting things we saw.

Thermopolium of Lucius Vetutius Placidus.

Thermopolia. These were essentially the fast food restaurants of the ancient world, patronized by the poor and those who couldn't afford houses with private kitchens. Pompeii is littered with them and you can always tell what they are because they've got a big counter with huge jars for storing dried food set into the counter. Some even had upstairs seating areas!

Tubs for urine (not bathing).

Part of the Forum Baths.

A fuller's shop. These shops were like the dry-cleaning of the ancient world. You'd take your toga to them to be cleaned and it would usually be stamped around in a large vat of urine by slaves, the urine containing large amounts of ammonia that helped whiten the cloth. It would then be washed. In the fuller's shop we saw, an American family with a couple of small kids was under the impression that they were looking at a bathing establishment. I knew it was a fuller's shop because it looked nothing like any ancient bath I'd ever seen and because my guidebook told me so. I was tempted to tell the father, "Actually, sir, no one would have bathed here; these were tanks for storing urine to wash clothes," but I didn't want to come off as a know-it-all jerk.

The Forum Baths. A much smaller bath complex than the grand imperial baths in Rome, it gives you a much better sense of public baths as they existed outside the capital. It's still beautifully decorated and this one has a separate men's and women's bathing area.

Theater.

The theater and amphitheater. The theater and amphitheater are two different ends of town and no important Roman town would have been complete without them. The theater, dating from the second century BC, would have been used for theatrical performances but also gladiatorial shows until these were transferred to the amphitheater, built in the first century BC.

Lisa in the House of the Ship Europa.

The House of the Ship Europa. This was a private house near the amphitheater named for the graffito discovered on one of the interior walls showing a cargo-ship named "Europa." Middle-class Roman houses typically had very few exterior windows, just openings onto a central courtyard, making it rather dark inside. This explains all the ancient oil lamps so many museums have in their collections. Another interesting feature of this house is that the garden and vineyard behind it have been replanted with the plants that were there in antiquity. They've determined what to plant by making casts of the roots cavities found when excavating through the ash, cavities which remained behind after the plant decomposed, then analyzing the root structure.

The line for the brothel.

The Lupanar. This is the largest brothel discovered in Pompeii, consisting of ten small rooms, each with a platform that would have had a mattress for a bed. Above each of the rooms is an erotic painting which may or may not indicate that particular prostitute's specialty. Needless to say, this is one of the more popular sites in Pompeii for tourists to visit and it was the only place in the site where we saw security guards, making sure people kept moving through and didn't hold up the line to get in!

A brothel room.

Brothel menu?

The front courtyard of the House of the Faun.

The House of the Faun. This was one of the largest private residences in the city and contained a number of artworks. It dates from the second century BC, with later additions and renovations. Unfortunately, I got us lost trying to find it and, as we had to catch our train back to Naples, we spent all of about three minutes inside before heading out of the site.

Street in Pompeii; the stones are to help
ancient pedestrians avoid water and
garbage when crossing the street.

Lisa noted that one of the most disappointing things about Pompeii is the emptiness and lack of artifacts. Everything is really just an empty building because almost everything that has been found inside the site is now housed at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. As she said, you get an incomplete pictures of what life was like without seeing what was inside a house or a brothel or a shop. I hadn't really considered this before, because I had seen the museum in Naples. Unfortunately for us, because we were doing this as a day trip, we didn't have time to visit the museum, but also, since it was a Tuesday, the museum would have been closed anyway.

Stand with fresh orange juice.

On the walk back to the station, we bought some delicious fresh-squeezed orange juice from a stand outside the site. Once back in the Naples train station, we had a while to wait for our train, so we poked into some of the stores inside the station. We got snacks on the train again and when we got back to Rome a little after six, we took a bus to the Corso and shopped a little near the Piazza Navona. We headed across the Tiber for dinner and stopped at the chocolate store on Via San Francesco di Ripa that we visited the last time we were in Rome. It's still run by the kindly middle-aged couple and we bought some yummy chocolate for ourselves and as a gift for others. We had a good dinner in Trastevere at an uncrowded, fairly local-seeming place, then headed back to the convent for sleep to get ready for our last full day in Italy.

Coming next: a return to Florence.

Day 7: Another New Hotel, a Day of Churches, a Bus Breakdown

Vatican Post Office trailer.

On Monday, we had our final odd breakfast at the bed and breakfast and then we walked up to St. Peter's in order to mail some postcards from the Vatican Post Office. As many of you know, the Vatican postal service is faster and more reliable than the Italian one (although Italy's been trying hard in recent years to improve it) and since this was our last day near the Vatican, we thought we should mail things now while we could. After that, we checked out of the B&B and took a bus and then a cab to our last hotel, another convent guest house south of the Circus Maximus on the Aventine Hill. An Australian nun checked us in and while the place was pleasant and clean and in a good centrally-located neighborhood, it seemed like the whole idea of running a hotel was a huge burden to this nun and to her convent. We were sort of put off by that and the breakfast, while better than at Massimo's, wasn't as good as at the first convent.

Bronze doors from the senate house on
San Giovanni in Laterano.

Our room wasn't ready yet so all we could do was drop off our bags and then head back out into the city. On Monday, all the museums and almost all of the archaeological sites in the city are closed so I had planned for the day to be a "church extravaganza" day, since those are about the only things open. Since it was already 11:30, I knew that of the four churches I had wanted to go to, we'd have to skip at least one. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that most churches are closed between about noon and 2 or 3 o'clock. So I picked one I knew would be open - San Giovanni in Laterano. We took a tram from near the hotel to close to the church and on the walk up from the tram stop, we got a take out sandwich and salad and ate lunch on a bench along the street, taking advantage of another nice sunny day.

San Giovanni in Laterano.

Like Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano is a papal basilica and is sovereign Vatican territory. It's also the cathedral for the city of Rome, meaning it's the pope's home church in his role as bishop of Rome. Therefore, after a pope is elected, he's officially enthroned as bishop here in San Giovanni, rather than in St. Peter's. In fact, it wasn't really till the fourteenth century that the Vatican became the pope's home; before that, he lived in the Lateran Palace attached to San Giovanni in Laterano.

If you sit in this chair, you're the pope.

The reason the church has this prominence is because it was originally built by Constantine in 312, making it one of the earliest churches in Rome built after the legalization of Christianity. In fact, Constantine built the church specifically to be the cathedral for the bishop of Rome. (This prominence also explains why it's open over the lunch hour!) Much of the church was renovated and reconstructed in the 18th century, so it doesn't have much of an ancient or medieval feel. But there are some ancient bits throughout the church: the bronze doors of the church were taken from the ancient Roman senate house in the Forum and there's an ancient statue in the porch of the church identified as Constantine, but actually his son Constantius. There also some gilded columns inside from somewhere in ancient Rome and the mosaics in the apse date from the 13th century. Lisa noticed a sign for visiting the attached cloisters and she suggested we go in, since she loves cloisters. I'm glad we did because it was a beautiful medieval space with decorated columns, inlaid colored marble in the walls, and lots of fragments from the medieval version of the church lining the walls. One other thing about San Giovanni in Laterano - like Santa Maria Maggiore, it offered a free bathroom. I can only guess that this is a service the Vatican feels is important to provide in their basilicas for pilgrims and tourists!

Lisa in the cloisters at San Giovanni in Laterano.

Courtyard of San Clemente.

From there, we walked to the nearby church of San Clemente, stopping along the way for a snack of fresh apricots and ciambella (a giant sugared doughnut). As it stands now, San Clemente was built in the twelfth century and given to Irish monks fleeing persecution at the hands of the English in the 17th century. In the 1860s, the Irish father in charge of the church started doing archaeological excavations underneath it and discovered the original 4th-century church directly below the current one and then, below that, he found a set of first-century AD Roman houses which were probably destroyed in the Great Fire of 64 AD. You can walk down through all of these layers and see the 9th century frescoes from the first church and, in the bottom layer, an altar to the god Mithras from the third century AD. It's a very cool place, but unfortunately, pictures are not allowed. The best we can do is show you a picture from the church's courtyard.

From San Clemente, it was off to the third church of the day, Santa Costanza. This is a church built a couple miles outside of the ancient walls of the city by Constantine as a mausoleum for his family (it was turned into a church in Middle Ages). I had gone there as a student and I wanted to see how easy it was to get there using public transportation before deciding whether or not take students there when we go next year. We took a bus to the train station and switched to another bus that would drop us off right in front of the church. However, at a stop just outside the city walls, the bus broke down and everyone had to get off. We're not sure what the problem was, but the driver just couldn't get the bus to move forward. We decided this answered our question about trying to get to Santa Costanza using public transportation! Rather than wait for another bus going that direction (which could be a half-hour or so, based on our experience to this point) and miss seeing the church (last admission was 4:45), we took a bus back to the train station and walked from there to the church of Santa Prassede, not far from Santa Maria Maggiore.

Santa Prassede.

Mosaics in the Chapel of St. Zeno.

The whipping post.

I had never been to Santa Prassede before but I wanted to go because I knew it was famous for its mosaics, and rightly so, as we discovered. The small church honors Saint Praxedes, whose father is traditionally regarded as Peter's first convert in Rome. The mosaics in the apse and in a side chapel date from the 9th century and they're amazing - lots of gold, lots of vibrant colors, and a very Byzantine-feel to them. The ones in the apse depict Jesus, Peter, Paul, Praxedes and her sister Pudentiana, and Pope Paschal I who commissioned the mosaics. Pope Paschal had the side chapel (dedicated to Saint Zeno) built as a funerary chapel for his mother, Theodora, who's depicted in one of the mosaics. There's also a piece of the (alleged) column on which Jesus was whipped prior to his crucifixion. We met a rather greasy man there who clearly worked for the church in some capacity. He explained in Italian (with a little English thrown in) all about the history of the church and St. Praxedes. We didn't understand much of what he said, but it was nice of him to try to tell us!

No Valrhona store, but we found a Pinocchio.

After Santa Prassede, we walked back to the train station and caught a bus to the Via del Corso and then walked into the Campus Martius. (As a side note - one of the most educational things about this trip was learning the bus system. At the Centro, I only ever took three bus lines but over the course of this most recent trip, I learned about a dozen more, depending on what stop we were at and where we wanted to go. The Rome bus system is really quite extensive - you just have to wait a long time for a bus!) We were looking for the Valrhona chocolate store we visited last time we were in Rome which Lisa loved so much. Upon finding it, however, we saw that it was no longer in business; Lisa was very disappointed.

We had dinner near the Pantheon at a Rick Steves recommendation. It wasn't bad, but not as good as Il Focolare or Ristorante Porta Castello. Afterwards, we took a bus that dropped us off directly in front of our hotel. It took us past the Victor Emmanuel Monument, down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, past the Colosseum and along the Circus Maximus. It was a fun way to end the evening, seeing all these major monuments light up.

Coming next: A day trip to Pompeii.