Sunday in Roma

Luckily, I did not feel hung over in the morning. We left the hotel and headed for the famous Piazza Navona. This Piazza has a famous Church, three giant fountains, and it is lined with outdoors café’s, bistros and street artist selling paintings. We spent a good amount of time in the Piazza enjoying the wonderful weather and people watching. Afterward we did a little church hoping, visiting some of the most famous churches in Rome. On in particular I took note of was Chelsea San Luigi del Francesi because it had famous painting by Cavaggio inside.

Our church hopping lead us into the old Jewish ghetto. It is not a ghetto now, but during the ancient Roman Empire this was the old Jewish community. We decided to stop and get lunch here. Everywhere else seemed to have the same idea because we walked around to about four different restaurants asking if they had a table for five. Final we settled on a restaurant that said we could have a table if we waited, so wait we did. I wanted to try some typical Roman Jewish food, but of course all the items on menu were over priced because of tourist trap mentality. I ordered a pasta pesto dish, which was delicious of course.

With our stomachs full we headed our to the ancient Roman Teatro which was we could see from our restaurant. The teatro looked like a smaller version of the Coliseum. We could not enter the teatro, but you could walk around the teatro. It amazes me how the modern buildings and shops surround all of these ancient Roman ruins. The ruins don’t look out of place at all. The city just sprung up around them leaving them intact. That was one thing I really like about Rome. Among all the fancy piazza and touristy areas there would an ancient roman column or statue.

We wandered our way down to the Tiber River after walking around the teatro. Along the Tiber we took saw several houseboats and peoples cars parked along the river. We also people fishing the river. I am not sure what kind of fish they were catching if any; because the river did not look that clean to me. We decided to take advantage of our 23 euro Roma pass and visit another museum before our pass expired. We headed off toward the Capitaline Museum. This museum houses some of the most famous marble statues from ancient Roman and the Renaissance. It has several galleries filled with famous Italian paintings from Michelangelo, Cavvagio, Bortelli, Da Vinci, and several others. The most famous statue at this museum is off Marcus Aurealius riding a horse. It is one of the last bronze statues from ancient times in existence today.

We spent about two hours exploring the museum, which was enormous and even had an underground astrology exhibit. Nobody could decide what we were going to do next, so we took a little break on the steps of the Capitaline to ponder the next we wanted to visit. Our little stop turned into an hour and half of people watching, where Andrea stared down the hot security guard at the door until finally we came over to her and said hi. I told she needed to go back and talk to him and ask him a good place to visit. She agreed but we wanted to use the bathrooms first, so we went back into the museum but when we came back we were gone. Andrea’s dreams of falling in love with this sexy Italian were crushed.

Exhausted from 12 hours of walking around Rome, we headed back to the hotel and grabbed some pizza at the nearby pizzeria. With aching feet we all went to bed fairly early. Around 3:30 in the morning Andrea shot straight up in bed. She leaned over to me asked me if I could feel the shaking. Everything in our room was shaking: the beds, the lights, the windows, and the furniture. We had no idea what was going on, I had a fleeting thought that maybe we had one of those beds that you put the quarters in and it makes the bed shake. Andrea’s first thought was that since our hotel was so close to the train station maybe a really big train had just pulled in. We concluded that this was not a train after a minute or so, and then we realized that this was an earthquake, un teremonto. The next morning we woke to news about the teremonto, 6 point something on the rictor scale, that happened in Abruzzo, Italy about 200 kilometers away. We were luckily it was 200 kilometers away because 300 people died in Abruzzo in the earthquake and a hospital was destroyed.