Our journey to Rome began at 2:00 PM on
Friday from National Airport.
After several delays caused by thunderstorms on the East Coast,
especially in Montreal, we made it to Rome at 12:30 PM on Saturday (which would
have been 6:30 AM back in Annandale).
Alyson enjoyed her first two trips on an airplane, despite the
turbulence, but Kinsey was the only one who managed to get more than two hours
of sleep on the overnight trip. We took
the Leonardo Express from the Fiumicino Airport to the Termini station, and
then took the Metro Line A over to Valle Aurelia. And that led to our first big surprise.
Google Maps told us the best way to get
to our monastery hotel was through Clivo delle Mura Vaticane. What is pictured is the last part of the
street. Lots and lots and lots of
stairs. Just imagine the five of us
dragging our suitcases up all those stairs.
Then we took a wrong turn on Via di Porta Pertusa and roughly doubled
the distance it took to get the hotel. We
finally arrived to the hotel about 5:00 PM very tired and very sleepy. All we had the energy left to do was find
dinner.
The Pizzeria Rosticceria was the first
pleasant surprise for the trip. It is a
local neighborhood pizzeria that serves a lot of good pizza (many of them
vegetarian-friendly), as well as lasagna, calzones, and a number of cold pasta
dishes. It also had an air-conditioned
basement that felt really good after a hot day of walking. We came back on Sunday night since it was one
of the few restaurants still open.
Sunday started with a guided tour of
catacombs and the churches during the time of Early Christianity. The day began with the Catacombs of San
Callisto, which started as a series of caves formed from volcanic rock and
turned into a four-level tier of catacombs stretching over 30 kilometers
wide. Nine of the popes were buried here
until St. Peter’s Basilica was built and the bodies were moved there. There is a monument to Saint Cecilia in the
tomb, as well as a number of the original frescos from the first tier of the
tomb. Unfortunately, no photography was
allowed in the catacombs (or in the churches we later visited on the tour).
We moved on to the Basilica di San
Clemente, which is an 11th century Catholic basilica (which still holds masses
at 11:00 AM on Sunday mornings), built atop a 4th century home of a Roman
nobleman that was converted into a church, which itself was built atop the
ruins of a 1st century house that was burned down as part of Nero’s Great
Fire. Archaeologists excavated down into
both layers underneath the church so you can walk down and explore Rome’s past.
We toured the Church of the Santi
Quattro Coronati, which more resembles a fortress than it does a church. We watched part of a Roman Catholic Mass at
the church, heard the Lord’s Prayer in Italian, and heard the order of the nuns
that serve and live at the church sing hymns.
Our first stop after the tour was the Trevi Fountain and the huge marketplace that has sprung around the fountain. The fountain is beautiful, and no one single photograph that I took can show its beauty.
Kinsey and Alyson gleefully toss their coins into the Trevi Fountain.
We wandered west through the Italian marketplace and wound up at the Pantheon. The Pantheon started its life as a temple to the Roman Gods, but in the 7th century, was converted into a Roman Catholic church called Santa Maria della Rotunda (St. Mary and the Martyrs).
A painting of the Virgin Mary inside the
Pantheon. Our final destination for the afternoon
was the Piazza Navona, which is home to the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, or the
Fountain of the Four Rivers. The
fountain was built in 1651 to immortalize the four “River Gods”: Ganges, Nile,
Danube, and the Rio de la Plata. The
photograph shows the base of the fountain, which is topped by an Egyptian
obelisk (one of four such obelisks in Rome; we spied the second obelisk
fountain outside the Pantheon). Kinsey poses on the side of the Fountain
of the Four Rivers. For you Dan Brown
fans out there, in his novel, “Angels and Demons,” the fountain was the
Water-based Altar of Science.
We are now exhausted from a full day of
sight-seeing, so we are going to get some sleep. Stay tuned for more posts from Rome.
