This day was our last full day in Rome - and we started it like we started every other day, at the cafe around the corner from our apartment! We had only a vague plan for the rest of the day and first set out across the river to try to visit the Pantheon again.
This time, the piazza was completely empty! Lesson learned - don't try to go to touristy places in late afternoon. It's pretty crazy how, from the outside, it's a moderately impressive building but nothing super noteworthy, mostly because you can't really see how big it is because of the other buildings and narrow streets. But inside it's huge! I feel like the only photo I took that almost captured how huge it was was the panorama from my phone:
(click to see it bigger!)
It's too bad that the Catholic church took it over like they did all of the other ancient Roman stuff, but at least it's fairly easy to ignore if you look up at the ceiling!
After our necks got tired of admiring the view, we just wandered around. I didn't get a photo of the best store I saw in Rome - a place for Catholic priests to buy their robes! The window display had all kinds of fancy robes and it was just so strange because we both assumed that they got robes as part of their job...like a uniform?? I also missed the chance to take a photo of the "attractive priests 2017" calendar for sale at a street vendor!
We sat in a nice park for a little while, laughed at the local cats running through the bushes, and stopped in Santa Maria della Vittoria to see the Bernini sculpture. (It was kind of a Bernini day, actually!) I'd really wanted to see this one in person, and it didn't disappoint! We really liked how in Rome, you could see a lot of amazing artwork for free, in situ, instead of feeling like you needed to pay for a bunch of museum tickets.
After walking around, it was pizza time! This was some of the best pizza we had in Rome (and we didn't have any in Florence!). One of them had zucchini and sun dried tomatoes and squash blossoms and the other had some kind of prosciutto-type meat (speck?). And the employees were nice and funny! After lunch, we walked for a little while to Villa Borghese, the big park in the north part of Rome. On the way, we passed by a big section of some ancient walls.
Our one planned thing of the day was our timed entry tickets to the Galleria Borghese to see the Bernini sculptures. It was one of my favorite places when I visited in high school, and it was nice to visit again after having studied him in college! It was pretty crowded at first (I think it sells out basically every day) but luckily that didn't last too long, so we were able to see everything without huge groups of people around us. Which was especially nice, since many of the rooms weren't that big!
We walked through the park to get to Piazza del Popolo - it was a really nice park! It felt a lot like Central Park. Lots of tourists but also lots of local people riding bikes, running, and walking dogs. When we got to Piazza del Popolo, we had a half an hour before the church we wanted to visit opened up after lunch, so we sat on the steps of one of the twin churches at the other end of the piazza. While we were sitting there, we saw one of our favorite players on Roma walk by! It's funny, because we whenever we see famous people in New York, it's not a big deal and most people don't pay any attention to them. It was the same here! Nobody even seemed to notice him.
When the church reopened, we went in to see the Caravaggio paintings and then headed back to the other side of the river. We ate dinner at a place about a block from our apartment and I think it was my favorite pasta in Rome? I had cacio e pepe, which Matt had gotten before, but this one was better! And Matt had pasta all'amatriciana, which I'd gotten before but this one was better. If we'd gone there the first night it might have been hard to try anywhere else!
After dinner, we sat on the steps of a fountain in a piazza a few blocks away and listened to a band play jazz music while people walked around and danced. It was really nice! There was a really cool vibe in Trastevere, even if it might be popular with tourists. And that was our last full day in Rome! The next day, we were off to Florence! Until then - -
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