After what we've done over the last two days, we eased off the extreme tourism kick. We're pretty exhausted so we limited ourselves to only two sites today.
Our first stop was the Capitoline Hill Museum, which claims to be the world's oldest museum. It opened in 1471 when the Pope gave ancient statues to the Roman people and placed them in two former palaces located up on Capitoline Hill. The palaces are separated at ground level by a piazza that Michelangelo designed and are connected underground by a tunnel. The museum is primarily filled with statues, busts of famous philosphers and emperors, and paintings. The highlights for us were:
- The giant pieces of the statue of Constatine (its hard to imagine how big this statue must have been when it was in one piece).
- The ruins of the foundation of the ancient Temple of Jupiter. The temple actually stood on Capitoline Hill on the same site as the museum, and it is possible to see part of the foundation (all that remains). Again, its impossible to imagine what the temple looked like when it was inact - although there were hundreds of blocks on display, they only account for a fraction of the blocks used to make up the foundation. And then of course, there was the temple on top of that.
After visiting the museum, we walked down the grand staircase from the Capitoline Hill piazza down to the Victor Emmanuel monument. The last time we were here it was covered with scaffolding, so its great to actually be able to see it now. We made our way to look at Trajan's Column. Trajan was emperor around 100 AD and had this 140' tall column built to show off all that he'd done in the world - the Roman Empire expanded to its furthest extents during his rule - think every country that surrounds the Mediterranean and more. Not only that, he built up new areas of Rome to accomodate the growing population. The Roman Forum that we saw yesterday was clearly not big enough for everyone, so he tore down an entire hill (which was as tall as his column stands today), and built another huge forum and an adjacent market.
We went into the Imperial Forum Museum, which gave us access to Trajan's Market. From the street it looks like it might be part of another amphitheater, but it was actually a multi-story semi-circular market. Vendors had their own stores in each of the arches on the first two levels that you can see in the pictures, and more stores likely existed on the level above that as well. With the Roman Empire stretching so far into the European, African, and Asian continents, one can only imagine what kinds of things you could by at this market. We walked around the ruins and then finished up in the museum where they had a special exhibit of photographs of iconic celebrities from the 1950's.
When we finished with the museum we made our way home, emptied our bags, and went out to grab a drink before dinner. Of course, we forgot that there was a huge soccer game this afternoon - the two Rome teams were playing each other and there was no way we were getting into a bar. At least it was easy to locate the bars - at the doorway to each bar, there were about 20 guys stretching their necks to catch a glimpse of the game on TV. We spent enough time walking around looking for a place to sit down that by the time we were about to give up, the game ended and most of the bars cleared out. We found a spot with a Happy Hour from 10 AM to 10 PM and relaxed before going out to dinner.For dinner we went to a small pizzeria and ate way too much food. And then decided to get dessert of top of that: a nutella and ricotta calzone. We made it home and Mike literally collapsed on the couch and went into food coma.
Tomorrow is my first day of school. Even though we've been in Italy for a while, its been a long time since I had to think about grammar and 5 out of the 7 verb tenses I know. All I know is that the first thing that will happen tomorrow is a two hour exam (both written and oral) to determine my placement. We've already decided that Mike is going to take over the blog for the next week since I anticipate a five-day headache.
Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Aprite Sesame (Open Sesame) e Cooky
Aviva - Aprite Sesame
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