Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome
Met up with TJ and Mel at the Colosseum - Keighley actually picked them out of the crowd with the zoom lens on the camera :) Very cool to walk around the Roman ruins with them...the only sad thing was that it made me want to call my mom (who would have loved that we were walking around Rome with TJ), and of course I couldn't. (Although I still have her number in my cell phone and for some reason, I can't make myself delete it.) Tried to imagine the gladiators and the Christians being fed to the lions here. The place is immense.
There's a big hole in the top of the Pantheon -- an actual hole. How did they build this back in the day without computers? Everything is so precise. And the hole...? They close the place at 7:30, but an enterprising (and determined) person could just rappel up the side and drop down the hole if they really wanted to. How do they keep the birds out? The snow out? There are tiny holes in the bottom of the floor that drain the rainwater away. It's an amazing feat of engineering.
Right around the corner from the Pantheon is a little ice cream shop named the Café Minerva, which sells Limoncello gelato.
More mimes in Italy than France, which is surprising.
The Vatican museum goes on forever and ever, a labyrinth of rooms papered and frescoed and sculptured within an inch of its life with art booty scavenged and looted from every section of the world. You know when you've wandered off the beaten track, because you end up in the rooms with the bored looking guards who never see any people and don't care if you take any pictures (as long as you don't use flash). Cool modern art in the "who cares?" section, including a modern version of Michelangelo's Deposition that we saw in Florence. By the time you make your escape (an art in and of itself), your eyeballs are buzzing. Vatican City is a huge storeroom of artwork, so much so that you have to crick your neck back to look at some of it over your head (including the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, but by the time you get to that part, it's a huge anticlimax after all the art overload getting there, and the room is kept stuffy and dark and it's crammed full of sweating, shoving people and all you can think about is getting the h*** out of there).
Popetown. Ring-a-round a college of popes to circle the king of all popes, St. Peter, who supposedly started the whole thing. Once you get inside (long lines in the hot sun, no shade), you finally get to see Michelangelo's famous Piéta, also the shrines to the remains of several popes, including Pope Paul II, who is apparently under armed guard at all times (probably to keep people from snatching off parts of him and carrying him off to become relics at various churches hither and yon...see what happened to Catherine in Siena, Venice, and Rome....) and of course, more artwork.
Spied a nun text-messaging and then picking out a ringtone. Couldn't resist taking a picture :)
Images of downtown, including the building (the brown one below) where Mussolini made his speeches:
http://www.freereservation.com/roma2/22.htm
By the time we got there, they had just closed -- at 6:50...who closes at 50 minutes on the hour??? We knew we'd found the place because of all the tourists crowded around the gates, sticking their cameras inside to take a picture. Roman Holiday indeed....
