Italian Interlude: Part Tre

The next morning we planned to visit the catacombs, which lie along the Via Appia Antica (or Ancient Appian Way), an original road from the Roman Empire which runs outside the city. It was used originally for the military and became a heavily traveled and busy road. Now little remains there but scattered ruins. We took the bus to the city center and walked past the Roman Forum and Colosseum to get there. On the way we walked past the ruins of the Circus Maximus, a track used for chariot races which had been used as early as the Etruscan times (1200-550BC).

We walked to the road that turned to the Appain Way where we waited at a stop for a bus to take us to the start of the old road. We waited some more. Then we waited. After further waiting we decided to walk the way. We actually saw some interesting things along the way:

Here is a photo of some of the original Roman stone road:

One place along the way was a recently excavated site called Capo di Bove. It was a villa from the Imperial era and contained many baths. Some tile floors were still intact. The structure was similar in style to the Roman villa in Alcalá de Henares, Casa de Hippolytus.

While taking picture of Capo di Bove, a cat ran up to me and followed me around the site. Here's the cat trying to steal some pastries I bought at a little store on the Appian Way:

We saw the tomb of Cecilia Metella along the way. She was the daughter of a Roman consul in the Republican era whose husband, a wealthy noble, constructed a tomb for her. The tower of the tomb remains in good condition:

We then visited one of the catacombs, the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. Here is the entrance:

The catacombs are underground burial chambers from the Roman Imperial era. This one in particular (as well as most others) were for Christians who could not be buried elsewhere because of scarcity of land. Also the persecution of Christians during the early Imperial era lead to these burials in secret underground chambers. The Catacomb of San Sebastiano was used from the second century AD until the early middle ages. Its most impressive room included three structures which looked like houses carved from the rock complete with windows, front doors, and decorative paintings. Most of the bodies have been moved and none were visible (as is the case with the catacombs of Paris).

After the catacombs we walked back to the center of Rome. I got these pictures along the way:

That night we walked around the central area and I found a cool store that was advertised by its sign as an "Oddities Shop." It was close to the Pantheon and seemed like something out of a Ray Bradbury novel (especially as I couldn't find it to get better pictures the next time I was downtown). Mostly everything in it was expensive, but it was fun to look at. There was a giant wooden statue of a Tahitian god with red jewels for eyes (which looked like they glowed in the dim light). The walls and shelves were decorated with several tin toys from the early twentieth century, old travel advertisements, and antique, framed tarot cards. A black-and-white television played an old film of a magician performing traditional tricks (pulling rabbits out of top hats) and the back of the store sold supplies for magicians and had a fortune-telling machine with a crystal ball. Here is a picture of the store-front window:

The next morning I got some cannolis from a market near our place. These are pastries stuffed with sweetened ricotta chesse and chopped pistachios, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and had a candied orange-peel on either end. They were less sweet than the cannolis I've had in the United States:

The next day we moved from Plus Camping Roma to another hostel because we could only make the booking for seven days. The other hostel was in the central area, close to Termini train station and was called the Yellow. It was run by Americans and Australians. We checked our stuff there, then returned to the Pantheon where we were able to visit the interior. It was quite impressive and included several tombs such as Vittorio Emanuele II and Raphael. The most striking feature of the interior is the giant dome roof with the open hole in the center:

After visiting the Pantheon, we walked to Villa Borghese, a large late-Renaissance villa on the outskirts of Rome constructed for Scipione Borghese who was a Cardinal, member of the nobility, and an art collector. I wanted to visit the Galleria Borghese which has a collection of Bernini sculptures, but reservations had to be made several days in advance. Instead I walked around the villa, taking pictures of the gardens and buildings:

On the way back from Villa Borghese, we walked through Piazza Barberini where Bernini's Fountain of Triton is located:

We also walked down the Via delle Quattro Fontane, a street with an intersection in which each corner has one of four similar fountains:

Italian Interlude: Part Due

Since Vatican City, located within Rome on the West side of the Tiber River, is a sovereign state, I can say I spent one day on my trip outside of Italy. On the third day in Rome, we took the bus from our hostel which dropped us off near the walls of Vatican City, but we had to walk a little way to get to our destination, the Vatican Museums:

The Vatican Museums hold an immense display of objects collected by the Popes since the 1500s. We entered the museums around ten in the morning and it was very crowded as the doors were closing early that day because of New Year's Eve. I heard innumerable languages being spoken throughout the visit. We first came upon a large courtyard with a sculpture by the contemporary artist, Arnaldo Pomodoro, called Sphere Within a Sphere.

The first room we entered was full of sculptures from ancient Rome:

An adjacent room held several well-preserved full-body statues of Emperors and mythological figures, such as this portrait of Caesar Augustus:

We walked upstairs to a display of Egyptian artifacts. From a balcony I got a picture of the opposite side of Sphere Within a Sphere:

The next room in the museum was the Rotonda, a miniature Pantheon which was lined with ancient statues including a bronze sculpture of Hercules:

This led to the Hexagonal Courtyard which held several statues, most notably Laocoön and His Sons, a work from the Hellenistic Period of Greek history (323BC-146BC) which has been attributed to various sculptors from the Greek island of Rhodes. Many consider it the greatest work of ancient sculpture. It depicts a scene from Greek myth in which a Trojan named Laocoön, who doubted the gift of the Trojan Horse, was killed along with his sons by snakes sent by the gods.

There were many paintings in the museum as well by the Italian Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Caravaggio. Several hallways with ornate ceilings connected the rooms:

This all led to the Sistine Chapel. The chapel was filled with people all staring up toward the ceiling at the famous frescoes painted by Michelangelo from 1508 to 1512. According to the story, Michelangelo was reluctant to paint the ceiling which Pope Julius II had commissioned as he doubted his skill as a painter, being more focused on sculpture and architecture. There was so much to see that you could stand in one place for several minutes, looking at the same area of ceiling and continually notice something new to the eye. Around the walls were more frescoes, such as another by Michelangelo and older paintings by Raphael and Botticelli.

After the museum, we walked along the walls of Vatican City and eventually came upon St. Peter's Basilica and St. Peter's Square:

St. Peter's Basilica was built from 1506 to 1626 and replaced the original basilica built under Emperor Constantine. As we were walking along the plaza the Italian police arrived and had everyone leave as preperations were being made for the Pope's New Year's address.

We walked down the main street heading away from Vatican City and emerged upon Castel Sant'Angelo, which was originally constructed in 139AD as the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian. During the late Middle Ages it was used as a fortress by the Popes and is now a museum:

I also got some pictures of the Tiber River from here:

As the public transportation stops at midnight in Rome and our hostel was outside the city, we could not stay for the New Year's celebrations. We returned to Plus Camping Roma where several people shot off fireworks. The next day we went back to the central area of Rome and walked past the Ara Sacra di Largo Argentina, a collection of excavated temples from the Roman Republic. The area was now occupied by cats, as are several other Roman sites.

We then walked to the Pantheon which is not far from the main street in central Rome, Via del Corso:

The Pantheon was built around 125 AD under Emperor Hadrian, rebuilt from a destroyed temple for the worship of all the gods. It has been in continual use since then and today serves as a church and tomb. It was closed for services this day, so we went back another to see the inside.

We then returned to Via del Corso and made our way up some side streets to the Trevi Fountain. This is a giant Baroque fountain completed in 1762 by a series of sculptors. It drew a very large crowd the day we were there.

I bought some gelato from a gelateria next to the fountain. It was quite good and lived up to its praises I'd heard. Here is the display of gelato from this place:

Back to Via del Corso, we walked past several department stores advertising sales, then travelled up another side street where we found the Spanish Steps:

These eighteenth-century steps lead from the Spanish Embassy to the Trinità dei Monti, a sixteenth-century church. The obelisk seen in front of the church (as the other obelisks in Rome) is an original from Egypt. We wound back to Via del Corso and emerged at its end, Piazza del Popolo, a nineteenth-century piazza where several festivities were going on and a mime with a wooden gun ran among the people with a searching expression.

That night I ate at a little trattoria (a family-owned restaurant) in the city. I got a local version of pizza, called pizza capricciosa which has prosciutto, olives, artichoke, and an egg. It was wonderful. As seen in the picture, the toppings are not spread throughout the pizza:

Italian Interlude: Part Un

It's been awhile since my last post. I spent eight days in Rome, starting on December 29. It was an amazing trip. The weather was cloudy and rainy several days, but Rome has a certain quality that draws you in. While I was ready to return to Spain at the end of the eight days (living out of a suitcase for that long can be wearisome), I knew I would miss Italy and immediately wanted to plan a return.

Rome (or Roma as it's known in both Italian and Spanish) is a much older city than Madrid. While Madrid emerged as a city in the 800s AD, Rome already existed as a small village nearly 1,700 years prior. Madrid is the larger of the two cities, exceeding the population of Rome by 1.5 million people. There was much history to see in the city including the ancient ruins of the Roman Republic (510-44BC) and Empire (27BC-476AD), the remnants of the medieval city, Renaissance art and villas, monuments to the nineteenth-century wars of Italian Unification, and a few relics of the Mussolini dictatorship.

Cody and I left Madrid from Barajas Airport at six in the morning. Since the public transportation does not run all night and we had to be at the airport early, we stayed the night in our departure terminal. I stayed awake the whole night, wearing the swashbuckler goatee I had decided to have as a joke for the trip. Our airline was Vueling, a discount Spanish airline which offers flights all throughout the European Union. The flight lasted about two hours. When we arrived at the airport we took a shuttle to the main train station, Termini. From there I followed the directions from my hostel booking to our place. The directions told us to take the Metro to the stop called Valle Aurelia. Once there, the hostel was supposedly right down the Via Aurelia. The directions did not specify that our destination was located five miles down Via Aurelia and that Via Aurelia was nowhere near the Metro stop. After several hours of searching for maps and walking through the rain, we finally espied our place, Plus Camping Roma outside the city limits. We checked in to what looked like a typical camping resort found in the Ozarks, walked across the street to a grocery store called Panorama where we bought some food, then ate and slept until the next morning. Here is a picture of Plus Camping Roma:

After this rough start the rest of the trip went smoothly. There was a bus stop in front of the hostel which took us to the center of the city, at Piazza Venezia. When we got off the bus, the first thing we saw was the giant Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a unified Italy who took the throne in 1861. The monument also holds the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (from the First World War) and was built between 1911 and 1935.

To the right of this monument stood a large expanse of Roman ruins. The first we saw was Trajan's Column, which is part of the larger area known as Trajan's Forum. The column was constructed in AD 113 to celebrate Emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars. Spiralling up the exterior of the column is a continuous frieze, depicting the events of the Dacian Wars. The interior of the column contains a spiral staircase which is now closed off. A statue of Trajan once stood atop this column, but vanished at some unkown point. In the late 1500s, a statue of St. Peter was placed on top where it still remains.

Here is a detail of the column's frieze:

After this, we walked past Trajan's Market, a large area of ruins adjacent to Trajan's Forum. The buildings seen above the semicircular ruins in the picture below were constructed in the Middle Ages. We went inside Trajan's Market, so I'll mention more about it later.

We next walked across the street to the area of the Roman Forum, the central location of the ancient Roman Republic:

We bought tickets to go inside the Roman Forum which were good for entrance into the Palatine and Colosseum as well. The Roman Forum, which lies at the bottom of the Palatine hill, was overwhelming. It included many ruins from the Republic and Imperial eras. One such ruin was the Arch of Septimius Severus, constructed in AD 203 at the behest of the Emperor for whom it is named:

The ruins of the Temple of Saturn (the Roman god of farming) stood nearby. These are the oldest ruins in the Roman Forum. The temple, from before the Republican era, was originally constructed around 500 BC. After the original's destruction by fire, it was partially reconstructed in the late 200s AD:

Here is a photo of the two ruins side-by-side:

Down an old road known as the Via Sacra stood the Temple of Vesta (goddess of the hearth). This was originally built in the 600s BC, during the Roman Kingdom (753BC-509BC). Like all temples to Vesta, the building was originally rounded as can be guessed by the picture.

Across from the Temple of Vesta stood the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina (named after Emperor Antoninus and his wife). This was constructed in 141 AD. During the Imperial Roman era, traditional worship of the Roman gods (a religion adopted from the ancient Greeks) was replaced by worship of the Emperor. Once an Emperor died, they could be deified by their successor and worshiped by the people. Once Christianity took over as the religion of the Roman Empire, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina was converted into a church. Significant architectural changes were made to the structure in the meantime, but due to its continued use and care, the building remains in good condition. The church has since moved and the building is under the care of the city of Rome.

From here, we climbed up the Palatine hill where I was able to get a photo of the largest ruins in the Roman Forum, the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, built in 308 AD:

We continued on to the Palatine, the high area where many of the nobles of the Roman Republic and emperors of Imperial Rome lived. (Our word 'palace' derives from Palatine). Around 44BC a series of civil wars erupted in Rome which brought about the downfall of the Republic. The grand-nephew of Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus eventually took over as the first Roman emperor. During the early Imperial era, which was the height of Roman civilization, the power shifted from the area of the Roman Forum to the Palatine. On this hill now stand several ruins of imperial palaces as well as ancient orchards and vineyards.

The Hippodrome of Domitian, an Imperial-era stadium is also located here:

As we headed back down the Palatine hill, we could see the Colosseum:

We continued on our way to the Colosseum. It was built somewhere around 70AD and is the largest Roman ampitheater. Part of the external wall was demolished during the Renaissance for use in several buildings. It was built under Emperor Vespasian and was initially used for a variety of organized events which drew large crowds such as exotic animal hunts, military reenactments, and, most famously, gladitorial combats. In the later years of the Roman Empire, the Colosseum was used mainly as a theater. Some accounts claim the Colosseum was once flooded and used to stage a reenactment of a naval battle. We walked inside the entrance of the Colosseum between the two walls as seen here:

Inside on the upper floor of this outer ring was a display about Emperor Vespasian with several statues of him and his family as well as several pieces of the Emperor's propaganda (which in Imperial times had to be approved by the Senate). We then entered the inner ring of the Colosseum where the network of rooms which originally lied under the center are now exposed. Only one section of the original seating remains and can be seen on the left-hand side of this picture:

From one of the openings in the Colosseum I could see the Palatine hill and the Arch of Constantine, the largest triumphal arch in Rome, which sits outside the Colosseum:

The arch was completed in 312 AD to commemorate Emperor Constantine's victory in a civil war. Also in the Colosseum, this fragment of a sculpture was on display. It was discovered just last year:

When we left the Colosseum we walked past the Arch of Constantine to get some close-ups of it:

I got a sandwich of prosciutto and salami from a street vendor near here, then we headed back to Piazza Venezia. We saw that there was a free exhibition at the Monument of Vittorio Emanuele II and went inside. The exhibition was concerning Italian immigration to the United States and had several newspaper advertisements, personal photographs, and other items from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In another part of the monument (up several flights of stone stairs) was a museum of the Risorgimento (the Italian Wars of Unification). Throughout its history, Italy was a collection of several independent states. The wars, fought from 1848 to 1866 created the modern Italian state. A few places in the Italian Peninsula remain independent states such as San Marino and Vatican City. Many items from the wars were on display, including the sword of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the revolutionary commander and heroic figure of modern Italy. The museum led out on to a balcony of the monument where there were some great views of the city at night: