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| The Fountain of Triton |
Hello! I will try to make this brief, because I'm still pretty tired from this weekend and I need to get to sleep! I spent the last four days in Rome, whoo! I shall take you through my epic journey. Wednesday night I arrived at around 7:30 in Fiumuncino, a town about an hour away from Rome. By the time I got through customs and waited for my severely delayed bus, it was around 10:00 when I finally got to the main train station in Rome. Fortunately, I was able to find my hostel without too much trouble (I kind of got lost for about twenty minutes though, haha), and checked in. They had a very weird setup. They were running a mom and pop type of hostel out of a restaurant, so you checked in at the restaurant and then had to go a couple blocks away to a little apartment complex to find the actual rooms. It was a nice hostel because of the homey touch and very small size (three rooms, maybe 12 people there?), but the bathrooms were pretty horrifying. Still, breakfast was included, so they won their way to my heart!
Because I had left London at 3 and didn't get to Rome until 10, I hadn't eaten dinner, but I didn't feel too keen to venture out on my own. I was also really thirsty, but I'd been told not to drink the tap water in the hostel, so I was having a rough night. To make matters worse, the night was pretty cold and I shivered my way through. The next night I got set up with an extra comforter, but that first night I was a pretty sad, hungry, cold person. It just made me get up all the earlier to start my adventuring, so I can't complain too much!
Thursday I ate my free breakfast and started walking. I made a map to track my journey (I was curious to see how far I actually walked), so if you want you can look at my ramblings here. I ended up walking 14 miles, according to google!
Here's the famous Trevi Fountain!
Because I had left London at 3 and didn't get to Rome until 10, I hadn't eaten dinner, but I didn't feel too keen to venture out on my own. I was also really thirsty, but I'd been told not to drink the tap water in the hostel, so I was having a rough night. To make matters worse, the night was pretty cold and I shivered my way through. The next night I got set up with an extra comforter, but that first night I was a pretty sad, hungry, cold person. It just made me get up all the earlier to start my adventuring, so I can't complain too much!
Thursday I ate my free breakfast and started walking. I made a map to track my journey (I was curious to see how far I actually walked), so if you want you can look at my ramblings here. I ended up walking 14 miles, according to google!
Here's the famous Trevi Fountain!
A pillar that I recognize from a lot of texts, although I can't place what subject it would be from! I remember that Augustus or somebody is pictured several dozen times on it, but never in battle, which is a little strange since the whole thing is basically one big battle.
Here is a boat at the bottom of the Spanish Stairs, next to the house where Keats died. I don't really know very much about Keats, but I'm starting to dislike him. He keeps showing up in the same places where I am (like Hampstead), and he is always a downer. Getting sick or dying...I dunno, whatever.
From the bottom of the steps:
From the top of the steps!
I found a burial mound / mausoleum that they built for Augustus!
This is the Piazza del Popolo. It was one of my favorite plazas, and it lies right underneath the big estate of the Borghese (as featured by Respighi). I tried to figure out how to visit the house, but the roads all seemed like they were only for cars, and the best I could do was to find the horse corrals on their property, haha. Defeated, I returned to the Piazza where I saw a cool church, the Santa Maria del Popolo, so I went on in. It was very cool on the inside and had some Raphael artwork, etc, etc.
I found this in the hallway of the church by the bathroom. Poor Respighi! Although I looked it up, and these aren't actually his remains, so that makes me feel a little better!
I left the piazza and wandered along next to the river for a while. I saw lots of cool buildings and stuff, but afte ra while I came to the Castel Sant'Angelo.
You can see St. Peters from the river!
Here's the castle!
I was fortunate to come during "Cultural Week" so a lot of the museums and things were free free free! I got to go into the castle and poke around! If you feel like it, you should read up on the history. It was set up by Hadrian as an elaborate tomb, but after a while it got built into the walls and things and used strategically. There is an aqueduct looking thing that connects to the Vatican that used to be an escape route / communication point.
Some photos from inside the castle:
From the top of the castle!
There is an angel statue on top of the castle that was put up after an angel was miraculously sighted at its peak!
To be honest, I can't remember what this is right now...
The Pantheon!
Inside the Pantheon!
I believe this is now in a different church. I get a bit confused, because all churches were free so I poked my head in most of them, and because of the cultural week thing a heck of a lot of museums were free, so I just bopped on through them, even the art ones. They had bathrooms and they had benches to sit on, so I took advantage of the free ticket in almost every case. I think I went to five museums on the first day? It was quite a few.
Anyway, the below picture is from a church where they built a model of the "churches of the world." They even had one for the US.
The dome on the right is a painting! But the effect was pretty good!
Hey, it's a basilica!
Weary and sore, I returned back to the hostel to wait for Brad. The manager of the hostel brought a couple people over at about the time Brad was supposed to show up, and I thought I heard his voice, so when the manager and two girls walked in and I jumped to my feet they all thought I was crazy. I mentioned I was waiting for a friend from Nebraska and one girl said, "Oh, isn't that crazy? We just met a guy from Nebraska who is staying here. Small world." I was a little suspicious at this point, but I figured she must have meant somebody else already at the hostel. "Yeah, he said he was going to meet a friend or something, so that means there are going to be four of you Nebraskans here." Seriously? So anyway, long story short, Brad had in fact arrived with them but was in a different room, and I learned that the two girls weren't the sharpest tools in the shed in one blow.
We went to find some dinner and then Brad wanted to look around. I mustered my weary strength and set out again! We went south towards the Colosseum and all of that jazz, although we didn't find it at night. We still found a lot of other cool things to look at!
The Monument to Vittorio Emanuel II. He gets a whole building + museum!
The next morning, we walked back to where we had been at night! We were looking for the Colosseum but it didn't make sense on the map, so we spent a good 30 minutes dithering back and forth by this building until we used our eyes instead of the map and realized that we could see it on the horizon. We are not the sharpest tools either...
Walking towards the Colosseum past a bunch of ruins in the Foro Traiano and the Foro di Augusto / Cesare!
We had bought tickets online that got us into the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine Hill.
I was really impressed by the size of the Colosseum. I was less impressed by how very little information they had posted about it. There were maybe two plaques and otherwise it was mostly random information about restoration.
View from the Colosseum towards the Palatine Hill!
We continued our journey to the Palatino, and got to kick around with some old Roman stuff, also not very well explained at all. If you were lucky, there would be a little sign with something like, "Ville di Augosto" in a corner by the bushes.
A storm brewed up while we were on the top of the hill, and there was some sweet thunder, so we decided rather than die at the top of a historic place, we'd rather spent 30 minutes in an art museum, haha.
Waiting for the storm to clear.
These are the excavations of original houses built on the hill, back before the Roman Republic was a Republic, etc.
Look how much it was raining! You can see it running down the stairs.
They seemed to be doing a lot of restoration work, which is awesome!
Look at all that water! I was really glad that I stuffed a spare set of shoes into my backpack.
Back at the Monument, we decided to look for a bathroom and found a whole museum! It turns out later that it wasn't free, but somehow we managed to get in despite just blindly wandering past the guards. There were about seven big rooms dedicated to Italian military conflict in the past three centuries that conveniently focused a lot on Garibaldi and WWI and did not mention anything past 1924. No joke! I thought that was very interesting.
This was just a big seagull. I wanted to take a photo, haha.
Inside the military history museum.
I think this was Santa Maria in Cosmedin, but I might be wrong. It had a very, very different style of ceiling for a cathedral and I'm guessing it's a lot older than most. I liked it a lot.
Some random statues, etc.
For dinner, we went to an actual restaurant because we were getting tired of eating to-go food in the cold and rain. I asked for a "club sandwich" and got a mushroom salmon surprise! All my foes combined in one dish! I actually did eat everything except the mushrooms, so I counted it as a victory.
The rest of the day we just wandered around the "Circo Massimo" / chariot grounds and some random churches and parks by the Colosseum area. That night we went back into the center of town to look for some nightlife that involved sitting, since we were both really tired, but we didn't have a lot of luck so we ended up going back to the hostel pretty early. Before we went back I made Brad go to the cool Popolo church to look around, and we accidentally went in during some sort of a service. A few Italian ladies bustled up to us and told us to write down prayers and things, light a candle, and take part. We spent a few minutes in the service before we continued on our way, but I think that was very nice of them to include us. Then it was an early bedtime! No regrets, I love to sleep!
The next morning we got up and went to the Vatican! It was ridiculous getting there. You almost had to fight off people trying to swarm you with tour offers. "Skip the lines, I can get you in right now!" etc. One guy got pretty ticked at us, because he ran up to me and Brad and said, "Hey, you speak English?" I shook my head no in order to get rid of him, but Brad shook his head yes, so the guy got pretty pissy. "Oh, so YOU don't speak English, huh? Enjoy the two hour line!" PS: The line took fifteen minutes...
Before standing in line, however, we went to the Vatican museums. I was most enamoured by the ceilings and frescos. The actual museum was a madhouse of people, but otherwise it seemed very much like the British Museum. There was stuff ranging from mummies to Assyrian pottery, etc, etc, etc. Pretty interesting, but I was there to see the Sistine Chapel, dangit!
My favorite ceiling:
Some Raphael paintings, I guess? I dunno, people were all very impressed, so I took a photo or two even though they don't seem particularly interesting to me.
We weren't allowed to took photos in the actual Sistine Chapel, but to be honest, I was underwhelmed. There are so many churches / cathedrals with much more impressive artwork....I am not an art history appreciator, clearly. Sorry!
We went back and stood in the line, which did seem ridiculously long, but which moved rather quickly. They basically just wanted people to put their bags through an x-ray but they weren't stopping anyone from entering otherwise. We decided to climb to the top of the basilica. Intense!
I paid the 2 euro extra to ride the elevator...it would have been 500 some steps without it!
First break on the staircases was inside the church's dome! I had some crazy vertigo, because the walls were sloping in at that point and there was just a wire frame around the edge of the walkway. You can see how small the people are down there, ahhhh. The mosaics were ridiculous. There was a mosaic that, seen from the floor, appeared to have someone holding a quill of a very reasonable size. But once you are up there you realize the quill in the mosaic is bigger than a person!
As we climbed higher, the sides of the walls sloped steeper and steeper, which was very disorienting. I felt like I was in a Halloween fun house, but not in a good way.
Finally at the top! Phew!
We went to Mass at the church in the evening, which was a cool experience. I wouldn't have predicted a year ago that I would one day attend a Catholic mass in Italian in St. Peter's Basilica!
Dinner!
Using the guidebook that Sena got me for my birthday, we looked up all the gelato recommendations they had and tracked them down one by one. It was worth the extra walking, because we found this place. The counter curves around the corner, but there were easily 80 flavors, and it was all very cheap! I got three scoops for €2.50: mango, chocolate guianijjdaj (long name), and toffee. Pretty neat!
Gelato in hand, we went back to the Castle to look at it by night.
And the Vatican as well! There were nuns playing football in the courtyard with some kids. : )
The next morning Brad left for Spain, so I was left to my own devices. I wanted to visit the Catacombs south of the city along the Appian Way, but there was a strike and I was confused about whether the buses were running or not, etc. If I had been able to understand Italian I would have had a shot at figuring it out, but alas, I decided I was going to have to try on foot!
The church of San Giovanni Laterano. The Popes used to live here until the 14th century? That is what I understood from the Italian plaque out front.
Another cool church next door.
Trying to find the Appian way. Unfortunately, my map didn't extend that far south, so once I was off the edge I started getting nervous about where I was going, especially because there were no running buses that I could just hop back on to retrace my steps!
I had to admit defeat over the stupid Catacombs (sad face), but I did find the old Baths! The Terme di Caracella were incredibly impressive. I couldn't believe how much of them still exist, and they were so massive! Once again, my free admission urged me to wander around inside for awhile, haha.
I was getting nervous about getting to my bus on time, so I headed back to the hostel after a while. Here is another church I spotted. It looked cool so I climbed up the hill to look inside and nearly crashed a wedding! Whoops!
I ended up getting to the airport wayyyy too early. I had to wait two hours to check in, even, because the small airline I was using wasn't staffing the station until they had to, I guess. My flight was delayed a long time because of a health problem (and then when they weren't flying they had to remove their luggage, etc), and we kind of messed up the entire airport. When we finally left, we were waiting in a queue of planes about nine deep. It was kind of funny, actually, because they all sat there on the tarmac in a row, patiently waiting to take their turn on the runway while others taxied towards the back of the line. We also had a new pilot, so it took quite a bit longer to land than I was hoping as well. We circled a few times, haha. We also bounced when we hit. I don't mean bumped, I mean, the wheels struck really hard and then we caught some air against for a good five seconds before we hit again, haha. I feel bad for the plane's landing gear!
So I think that's it! I wish I remember the names of all the random museums and stuff I went in. Lots of "palaces," old villas, etc. Including one that overlooks a main square with a big balcony that apparently Mussolini did quite a bit of yelling from! By my estimates, I would say I walked about 50 miles in total, maybe a bit more, in 3.5 days, so I am understandably a bit tired! haha
I started my work placement today, but I'll have to make a separate post about that later. I also am expecting Will tomorrow, and I hope that he doesn't mind, but I haven't gone grocery shopping or cleaned my room since getting back yesterday, hahaha. It can't be worse than my hostel was, so he can't complain too much! Anyway, ciao!
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