roma day four: art & tasty food

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 - -

roma: day two

We woke up early on Sunday, our first full day in Rome - there were hardly any people walking around our neighborhood when we set out! We stopped at a cafe a few blocks from our apartment and had our first Roman cafe experience - it was a little hectic, but extremely inexpensive and with a friendly staff who didn't seem to mind too much that we paid after ordering instead of before because it was our first time and we didn't know any better! After our €1.20 (!!) cappuccino and €1 croissants, we started wandering north, eventually heading for the metro. It was nice to actually see some parts of the area we were staying in - we saw the old gate (Porta Settimiano), the Gianicolo hill that rises above Trastevere, and lots of winding streets.

















On the way, we walked over the Tevere, saw the fontana del mascherone (not sure of the English name, but you know...the weird, ancient sculpture), passed through the market at Campo dei' Fiori, and saw the cat shelter inside an ancient forum that I first saw back in high school! Maybe a half an hour later, we arrived at our chosen Metro stop! We were impressed at how easy it was to ride the train, how there were announcements saying which side of the car the next stop's platform was on, how often they ran, how clean the stations were...basically how much nicer things can be than our falling-apart excuse for mass transit!





About 15 minutes later, we arrived at the second-to-last stop on the line and got out. We hadn't heard too much English up until this point, but we didn't hear a word of it out here! We walked a few blocks from the metro station and arrived - at the Parco degli Acquedotti (part of the Parco della Via Appia, which we unfortunately didn't have time to visit!). And there were just a bunch of ancient Roman aqueducts standing in a huge field! With modern Romans walking their dogs and jogging and mountain biking on the paths around them. It was so cool!

















It was a big park, and we easily spent the first half of the day wandering around out there. Luckily! It wasn't sunny - there was absolutely no shade and it could have been super hot. When we reached the end of the park (we walked from the southern end all the way up north, seeing the various aqueducts) we took the metro back into the center of town and got out at Piazza del Popolo. It was juuust a bit more touristy than where we'd just come from! We wandered around and had lunch in a cute cafe before deciding to take advantage of the "first Sunday" thing in Rome.













All state museums are free in Rome on the first Sunday of the month! That includes the Roman forum, Colosseum, Capitoline Museums, Borghese Gallery, and a ton of other, smaller museums. We tried to get tickets to the Borghese ahead of time but they were sold out by the time we called. So we decided to go to a museum we didn't know much of anything about - but it was free! - Palazzo Altemps.













It's one of the four museums that house the state's ancient art collection - and it's all located in a Renaissance palazzo that Michelangelo designed part of (the courtyard, I think?). The rooms weren't super crowded with art, and there was hardly anyone there, even though it was the free admission day! The other really cool thing about it, speaking as someone who isn't knowledgable about or super interested in ancient sculpture, is that next to every sculpture there was a diagram that showed what pieces of it were original and what pieces were restorations. I had no idea that the ancient sculptures you might see in the Met or Capitoline museums can be such a mix of ancient and restored parts! It was really interesting - a figure might have its original head, torso, and left leg and a restored nose, right foot, and arm.

After that, we walked back over the river and hung out in our neighborhood until we got hungry for dinner and found a place a few blocks away. I had pasta all'amatriciana, which was new to me and so tasty! It's a tomato sauce with bits of crispy pork cheeks. I read that it was a local dish to Lazio so I wanted to try it and I'm glad I did!! We shared an appetizer of breaded & fried baccalà (salted cod), which is also a Roman thing.

...And now I'm getting hungry, so I should probably go!