I do not have any great love for Rome. In fact, while I’d love to go back to Italy and explore the countryside and different regions, I don’t think I’ll feel a burning desire to go back to Rome anytime soon.
Of course, Rome has its redeeming qualities. And yes, we visited on Easter weekend, which arguably was not wise timing. Rome has amazing history and culture, but at some point the balance tips and the place becomes over-saturated with tourists (ourselves included), mouths agape at various sights and sounds and begins to feel more like Disneyland than a city that real people live in.
Take, for instance, the Spanish Steps. Here is a picture of them at their absolute emptiest (our hotel was not far away, so we walked up or down them no fewer than five or six times over the course of the weekend). At their absolute most crowded, you couldn’t see the steps at all, just hordes of tourists straining to take photos, mostly in ridiculously large tour groups. The Spanish Steps are nice enough, but of all the things to ogle in Rome they actually aren’t that beautiful or impressive. We stopped to sit as we picked our way up the steps through the crowds for a break and to marvel at the crowd. While we sat, policemen came through telling people they couldn’t eat gelato or anything but water on the steps. Ridiculous.
We headed to Piazza Navona in search of souvenir Christmas ornaments…I had found a year-round Christmas shop nearby, which oddly was run by a 30-something Italian dude and was not your typical year-round Christmas shop (i.e., the walls weren’t plastered with cheap Christmas chattel, I don’t think there was a fake tree in sight, and no Christmas music!) I bought a nice mercury glass ornament in the shape of a Vespa to add to our collection. Here is the Fontana del Moro in the piazza:
Since I had visited Rome 15ish years ago, I’d seen many of the highlights. Severin hadn’t been, so he had a few must-visits. My only must-see was the Pantheon, which I vaguely recall walking past during my first visit but I definitely didn’t go inside. The inscription reads “Agrippa made [this] when consul for the third time,” but according to Wikipedia the Agrippa pantheon burned down and this was rebuilt in the 100s. (Note: I have strategically cropped the photos to eliminate the tourists, because most of them were cluttering up the foreground with selfie sticks).
The building was given to the Catholic Church in the 7th century and it remains a Catholic place of worship. While it would be much cooler if the whole place was still the bastion of pagan worship it once was (because that would be more fun to visit!), I do maintain that since no civilization lasts forever, it’s better/cooler for history that buildings be used and maintained continuously. Otherwise, this building would have ended up like the Roman Forum and been reduced to a few columns and pillars. Or it might have been carted off for scrap marble. Instead, we get to admire this magnificent dome. The recessed squares lighten the overall weight of the dome without compromising its strength:
I had downloaded a Rick Steves audio tour of the Pantheon, but only listened to the first ten minutes. It was nearly forty minutes long, and while there was good information it was wayyyyyy to hokey. There is probably a market for all of these hipster podcasters to get in the travel market and make entertaining and pithy podcast tours for the 20- and 30-something travel market.
We stumbled across this street randomly, I wonder if there’s any relation to our Nicosia:
My second souvenir mission was to try to find some unique Italian kitchen tools. I had Google-stalked two kitchen stores, and we visited both, including one twice. I was on the lookout for any nifty must-have Italian cooking tools, such as a mezza luna or other interesting Italian-y stuff. I’m sorry to say I did not have particularly good luck at either location despite my best efforts of trying to find something good. I did end up buying a pretty ceramic serving platter and four gelato spoons from one store…I’ve really been on a ceramics kick lately. If you’re wondering what “gelato spoons” are, they are little spoons with flat tops, all the better to scrape gelato out of a bowl with…those were a pretty good find, actually. I wish I had bought more.
These water fountains are all over Rome, and provide a continuous stream of fresh, cold drinking water. You can put your water bottle under the faucet to fill it it up, or use your finger to cover the stream and it will shoot upward out of the small hole you see on top of the pipe, just like a drinking fountain. Pretty genius…
Just a building I liked:
What my garage will look like one day:
We got really lucky on the hotel front. We stayed at the Hotel Modigliani, which we never saw on TripAdvisor but found in a random old newspaper article (from the Guardian, perhaps?) about Rome. We stayed on the top floor and while the ceilings were a bit low, parts of the room had vaulted ceilings, we had a couch and coffee table, plus two French doors out onto a balcony with this view. Two of the evenings we bought Prosecco and enjoyed the warm weather.
The thing I love most about old cities is that there a little ornamental details everywhere. You can walk a street a dozen times and never see them, if you don’t look up.
This otherwise non-descript intersection had a fountain on each corner:
