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.