Wednesday

Wednesday in a nutshell

Castel San't Angelo & the Pope Tunnel pics
St. Peters pics
Climb the Dome pics
Food Market in the Borgo
Santa Maria di Populo pic
Try Forum again - nope closed pics
Capitoline Museo
FormaggioMania
Campo Di Fiori & St. Barbara's
Gelati at Giolittlis

A couple words about the Coronet Hotel - wonderful location, terrible coffee.

	This morning, we bussed most of the way to the Castel San't Angelo. This is where the Pope can hide out whenever Visigoths come a'sacking. It was built to be Hadrian's tomb. Tosca leaps from its battlements into the Tiber.
	This is the other really old bridge over the Tiber. It was dressed up with Bernini sculptures.
	The Berninis are angels holding various pieces related to the death of Jesus. The cat-o-nine-tails, the dice, the spear, the vinegar sponge, etc. This one is holding a pedastal, which I'm assuming represents the column Jesus was chained to.
	The elevated walkway behind Dan is the Pope Escape Path. Instead of the secret tunnel described in Angels & Demons, it's a very visible, above-ground, covered walkway. We walked along this wall to get to St. Peter's.

We left Rome, and entered the smallest country in the world. They have several lines to pass through security to enter Vatican City. Those in the know stand in the left-most lines. They have airport like scanners and move a lot faster. Our line had a hire-a-cop patting each person down. These pictures are taken in St. Peter's Square. It is enormous, as you will see from the top-o-the-dome pictures that follow. It was designed by Bernini, and is actually a huge ellipse. The outside is a forest of columns, but there are two places in the Square you can stand where all you can see is a single row of columns.
Wow - what a cathedral! This photo kind of loses the scale, until you see the little tiny specks of people across the floor.
Michaelangelo's first major work, his Pieta, is here. Some guy went at it with a hammer in the 70s, so now it's behind a glass door. Even the holy water basins are amazing. As City Secrets puts it, "What a voluptuous use of marble!"
Here's the one on the opposite side. These are Bernini's, by the way.
You can buy a ticket to take an elevator up to the base of the dome and go inside. The letters of the inscription are about 6 feet tall. In that opposite wing down there, there is a church service going on.

	On the same ticket, you can continue on up to the the top of the dome. The path is like a fun house since the walls slant to match the curve of the dome.
	From the top of the biggest cathedral in the world you are substantially higher than anything else in view. Click here for a 270-degree panorama view (a big 500Kb file).
	Nice view of St. Peter's Square.
	Looking down in the Vatican Gardens.
	Here's a little rooftop Pope garden. But he couldn't ever use it with people like me leering down into it - makes me wonder why it's there.
	Half-way down, Dad snapped this shot. The columns I'm pointing towards mark the end of the elliptical arcs that define St. Peter's Square. The magnifying-glass is just evidence that I have way too much time on my hands.

We stopped and ate a little in the Borgo, the village just outside Vatican City. We walked through a food market. From the outside, it looked like it might be a grocery store, but inside it was more like a permanent farmer's market.

We walked to Santa Maria del Popolo. This church had been built when the local folks thought the ghost of Nero was haunting them, in the form of the crows that roosted in a tree. The pope at the time told them that if they funded a church to be constructed on the site of the tree, the curse would be lifted. Since the people funded it, it was named 'del popolo'

It holds two great Carravaggios. The Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of St. Paul. They're a little difficult to see, because they're in a nook and you have to stand about ten feet back, but in a way, that makes them more wonderful - these aren't museum pieces, they're church art.

It also has this really cool crypt with the skeleton in a cage.

This Santa Maria is at the top of the Via Del Corso, which is where seemingly all of Rome takes a pre-prandial walk. We only walked a block, and then hopped a bus. But the bus could hardly go, with all the strollers in the middle of the street.

The bus took us back to Piazza Venezia. From there we tried to get into the Forum again, but it locks up about 3:30 in the afternoon.

The columns in the photos are where Dad deciphered the "SPQR" acronymn which is today on the manhole covers and service vehicles of Rome. And do you remember the scene in "The Galadiator" where whats-his-name scratches off his SPQR tatoo? Well, across the marble at the top, is the inscription "Senatus Populus Que Romanus", "The Senate and People of Rome". Apparently it was so catchy that it has stuck for 2500 years.

The Forum is right next to the Capitoline Museo, which we wanted to see, so we ducked right in. The museum has the Capitoline Wolf statue, which is a 150 BC wolf, to which some Middle-Age sculptor added a little suckling pair of Romulus and Remus babies. The Dying Gaul sculpture is also here. Dad sat in the hall of a thousand busts, and laughed to himself because they all looked like SIU professors.

Then we bussed back down to the Aventine to go to Formaggiomania - it's really called Vollpetti's, but their bags say Formaggiomania, as does the City Secrets write-up. Fantastic cheese store - we walked in and they started handing out the samples. They can vacuum-pack their cheese for export. We had dinner at their pizzaria around the corner.

We then bussed back to the Tibernia Isle bridge and walked back to the hotel. We stopped in the smallest church we saw, St. Barbara's, and passed through the Campo Di Fiori.

Tonight's gelati was at Giolitti's. Dad tried to buy a Euro's worth of chocolate candy, which the woman approximated to to 1.40 Euros, and then seemed to offer Dad a sample of some marzipan fruits. But they ended up being charged for too.

Tuesday

Thursday