We resumed our running routine this morning after a few days off and it was suprisingly warm out - tee-shirt weather for most of the day, which made it a great day to walk around.
After breakfast we set out to do some more planning (a continuation from yesterday) before officially starting to be tourists. First, we walked over to the Colosseum to figure out the deal with the new section open for tourists. With hundreds of people waiting in line to get into the Colosseum, we realized it would be easier just to ask someone at the tourist information booth (which is oddly hidden from the view of any tourist in the area). The woman there gave us some suspicious-sounding information so we called the main number instead and made reservations. The Saturday Night Blog will hopefully blow your minds with exciting footage from the never-seen-before dungeons of the Colosseum (Mike is literally losing his mind). Our next task was to buy some tickets to a soccer game while we're in town. The two Rome teams are playing each other on Sunday but we don't know who we should root for, so instead we are planning to go to the Lazio (a Rome team) vs. Naples game on Sunday the 14th. We took what was probably the most circuitous route (read: we were not lost) to get to the tabacco shop/bar/sandwich shop/casino where one can buy tickets. Where we were promptly told that the tickets were not for sale yet. Which is confusing to us - the game is in less than two weeks! So, we decided Mike would go back next week to get the tickets while I'm in school.
While the day so far wasn't totally successful, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the neighborhood where the tabacco shop/bar/sandwich shop/casino was located was probably the least touristy area we've encountered so far. We found a place where we got great sandwiches for lunch and then found an even better gelateria for dessert. I tried my first tartufo - which quickly moved high on the list. Chocolate gelato with black cherries inside, covered by a hard dark chocolate "crust" with whipped cream on top. Hello! Why haven't we tried this before??
After lunch we made our way back through town to take a walking tour of the Jewish Ghetto neighborhood. On the way, we stopped for a quick peak of the Trevi Fountain, the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (the only Gothic church in Rome), and the Pantheon. The Pantheon is just cool - the best preserved monument in Rome and gets an A+ for engineering: the dome was the inspriration for the domes in the Florence duomo and St. Peters Basilica- the dome is as high as it is wide (think of it as half a sphere)
- the walls at the bottom of the dome are 23' thick, but at the top are less than 5' thick (to reduce weight)
- the inside of the dome has the concentric square design also to reduce weight, but maintains structural support
- the floor is slightly curved - highest point in the middle - so when it rains through the 30' wide hole in the ceiling (this is part of the design), all the water drains to the corners where there are small holes in the floor.
And on top of that, the woman for whom the Margherita Pizza is named is buried here (Mike said, "imagine if her name was Helga" - I'd like a Helga pizza, please...). Between her, Rafael, and Italy's first two kings (Victor Emanuel II and his son, Umberto I), there are some pretty influencial people in the Pantheon.
Finally, we reached the former Jewish Ghetto. We took the walking tour outlined in our tourbook. We'll have to return to actually visit the synagogue and eat at one of the local restaurants, but the most interesting part was seeing the buildings that remained from the time of the ghetto next to buildings that were built in the early 1900's: an old six-story building was the same height as a new three-story building (with many people to house and height restrictions to consider, lower ceilings were a pretty good idea). We walked back to our neighborhood across the river, picked up some vegetables, and stopped at home to cook dinner. We went out for dessert, looking for a new gelateria to try, and found a place that had some amazing gelato - it tasted like they were using fresh ingredients, which is great for fruit-flavored gelato.
Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Oreo e Gelatone (vanilla with nutella swirls) and Cannella (cinnammom) e Amarena
Aviva - Tartufo and Pera e Banane
No comments:
Post a Comment