Roma!

6-30-11: Roma, Italia

          We got off the cruise in the morning and took a taxi to our hotel in Rome.  It's called Hotel Emona and is in the southwest corner of Central Rome.  After putting our luggage away, we went to the mini mart and bought bus tickets and took the #3 bus to the Coliseum.  My dad bought tickets in advance, which I highly recommend if you go, because you skip the whole line.  The Coliseum was definitely a very neat place to visit and I really enjoyed soaking up the history and imagining Gladiator fights!  There was a Nero exhibit and altogether was a very neat stop.  

          We walked by the Roman Forum and observed from the street, but didn't go in.  We ended up in the Piazza Venezia, which had a very cool and huge building.  I'm still not quite sure what it's for, but it was still a cool building.  We stopped just above the piazza for some gelato and bottled water.  This was the largest and most expensive ice cream/gelato I've ever had in my life, but it taught me a valuable lesson: always ask about prices and sizes before ordering.  

          We then proceeded to the Pantheon, which is not all what I expected it to look like.  I was expecting some sort of large white building with many columns, but it's an old brown building with a giant dome.  Alex tells me that building a dome in those times is very hard and that's why it was so impressive, and I'm sure he's correct.  

          Next was the Piazza Navona, which was also huge and very impressive (are you getting the theme here?...things in Rome are huge and impressive).  There was a beautiful fountain in the middle and the whole middle walkway was lined with artists and very nice paintings.  The large domed structure is a church (not surprising - many of the large and fancy buildings here are churches, so it's generally a good guess if you don't know what something is).  It was very ornate, like most of the churches are here.  

         Finally we went to the Trevi Fountain, which is not at all what I was expecting.  I was expecting a circular fountain that was large and nice, but ordinary.  This fountain was gigantic and more rectangular.  The statues took up most of a wall and besides being crowded, it was very nice and peaceful.  I threw a penny into the fountain and made a wish so that was neat.  I saw other people standing backwards and throw the coin over their shoulders, so I just did it to.  I'm not sure if that's what you're supposed to do - it's possible that one person decided to do that and everyone else just thought that was the right thing to do, so who knows.  

          We returned to the hotel to learn that the free wifi worked (it didn't earlier in the day), so that was pretty awesome, because I hadn't really been able to do much in terms of internet usage on the cruise and I was getting pretty behind on things.  We went to dinner at a cafe and it was very yummy.  I had some pasta and a soda.  It's amazing how common pizza and gelato are here!  You'd think people would get tired of eating that all the time, but I guess not.  

          Looking back at the day, we were very impressed with how much we saw in one day!  We were worried that 3 days in Rome wouldn't be enough, but we hit a lot of the main sights in one day!

7-1-11

          Today we started out at the Spanish Steps, and they were very anticlimactic.  In pictures, they had flowers dividing the stairs into 3 sections, but there were no such flowers to be seen and they just looked like ordinary stairs to me.  We went to the top and enjoyed the nice view.  We proceeded to walk through some nice gardens.  We had lunch (pizza again...surprise!) and then went to a Leonardo Di Vinci museum that showed his inventions.  

          Next, we meandered our way to the Vatican, passing over the Tevere River.  We went into St. Peter's Basilica, which is probably the largest building I've ever seen in my life!  It was very ornate and impressive.  Make sure you wear clothing that covers your shoulders and knees (at least not shorts) so you can get in.  My dad had arranged a nighttime tour of the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel and so went over to meet up for that.  Again, this is a good place to buy tickets in advance (just for the Vatican Museums, not necessarily a tour).  The tour guide was very knowledgeable and I really enjoyed hearing commentary about the Vatican.  Because I don't know very much about religion, I think taking a tour helped me get a lot more out of what I was seeing.  The rooms of the Vatican Museums were again huge and impressive.  They just kept going and going and going....The Sistine Chapel was very nice, but started to hurt my neck a little bit from looking up at the ceiling for so long.  The guide told us the Sistine Chapel was the first painting Michelangelo had ever done and before that he was just a sculptor, so that's pretty amazing.  I'm amazed at how all the buildings are so big and grand for such a small countries (the smallest in the world).  I can now say I've been to the 2 smallest countries in the world (Vatican City and Monaco), so that's pretty neat.

7-2-11

          Today we didn't really have anything specific planned, so we did a little bit of wandering.  We took a bus from our hotel to Termini Station and went from there.  We looked around Termini Station, looked at the Piazza della Repubblica, and saw other neat things.  The neat thing about Rome is you can just wander and stumble upon something magnificent.  We saw some more churches, which were again all huge and ornate.  I feel like all of the churches were competing with each other to see who could build the biggest and grandest church.  I'm now sitting in the hotel lobby writing this and a taxi will be here at 6pm to pick us up and take us to the airport.  Our flight to London leaves around 9pm and then we'll stay there overnight and train in Cambridge tomorrow!