Today we went to the Uffizi.  We saw some paintings by Carvaggio, Michelangelo’s Holy Family,  Raphael’s Madonna with Goldfinch, Titan’s Venus (on couch), Venus de Medici, Bodicelli’s Venus, Allegory of Spring.  Some more medieval art and lots of random sculptures.  After that we had some sandwiches at an awesome little shop near the Uffizi.

We went to Santa Croce Church.  It seems everyone was interred here.  Michelangelo, Fermi, Galileo and a memorial for Dante.

 

We went to the Leather School after that.  They have very nice things but they are a tad expensive.  After that, we went to the San Larenzo Market.  I wanted a leather jacket from Florence and this was this first ‘shopping’ day for that.

After breakfast we picked up a chartered bus with out tour group and headed to Ostia Antica.  This city reminded me a lot of Pompeii.  If you were in Rome only a short time and could not visit Pompeii, Ostia Antica makes for a much closer (though less dramatic) substitute.

  

Finishing our tour of Ostia, we packed back into the bus and drove to the nearby Tyrrhenian Sea.  Of course I got some gelato.

We climbed back aboard the bus and headed back to Rome.  We visited the crypts at San Sebastian.  The church itself had a few wonderful statues but I found the crypts somewhat underwhelming.

Leaving the crypts we took a walk down the Appian Way.  This was the great road that stretched practically as far as civilization.  Along the way we stopped at the Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella.

 

 

We had some breakfast and took the metro to the Vatican.

The Vatican has a ridiculous amount of ancient treasures.  It’s mind-boggling.  On the one hand, they have protected a tremendous amount of priceless art- art that has a historical impact, art that is a high watermark of human achievement.  On the other hand, much of what they have just seems like it should belong to ALL people.  To their credit, it is fairly accessible.

They have Laocoon and the belvedere torso, both of which were ancient to Michelangelo.  They inspired his art and you can even see those poses and body forms in the Last Judgement.

 

The interior of the museum was lavishly decorated in nearly every possible space.  There were a lot of papal coats of arms displayed.

We also saw paintings by Raphael, including the School of Athens.  Raphael and Michelangelo were painting in the Vatican at the same time.  Michelangelo kept to himself and wasn’t very sociable as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Raphael had completed School of Athens and shortly after Michelangelo unveiled a portion of the ceiling he had been working on.  Raphael was so impressed with Michelangelo’s work that he went back to his own painting, School of Athens, and added Michelangelo to it.

After the Vatican museum we saw St’ Peter’s Basilica.  Here we saw Michelangelo’s Pieta and a number of incredible works by Bernini.

 

Yes, that’s marble.

I did the cupola climb to the top of St. Peter’s and took a few photos from Michelangelo’s dome.

After climbing down, we walked by Castel Sant Angelo before heading off to our cooking class.  While we didn’t really learn anything new in the class, we made an excellent dinner and enjoyed some wine!

Today we went to the Borghese Villa.  The villa is in the middle of a beautiful park in the shape of a heart.  The Borghese Gallery is here and it is full of very impressive art.  Lots of great Bernini pieces; Apollo and Daphne, the Rape of Persephone, David and Goliath, Fall of Troy.

They had pieces by Raphael and Carvaggio as well.  There were a lot of statues in the gallery that had been restored (inaccurately) by combining found pieces of statues.  Heads that weren’t quite the right size or facing the right direction, etc.

We also saw a number of other notable pieces.  Venus on couch (Napoleon’s sister modeled for this statue), busts of the Medici (Bernini), and Titian’s Sacred and Profane.

We had our final dinner with the Rick Steve’s tour group.  We had a blast in Rome and the tour was really great.  They gave a lot of information and we saw a lot of sites!  It was pretty fast paced and the group that joined us was a fairly intellectual group so I thought it matched our style pretty well.  I would strongly recommend one of these tours of you like your trips a little bit nerdy.  After dinner, we ended up staying up pretty late just chatting with a few members of the group.

Today was the ‘Ancient Rome’ day of the Rick Steve’s tour.  We started with a guided tour of the Forum.  Lots of ruins…. in ruins.  Lots of marble was stolen from these buildings to use for building materials.  Not just for the beautiful marble such as found in churches in the area, but they stole marble to burn it and make quicklime for mortar.  The Forum is more or less the birthplace of society- news, politic, debate, trade.

  

 

The Romans wanted to be remembered.  Their buildings were on a scale of giants- they used their architecture to intimidate.

We went on to the Colosseum.  It was massive, tremendous and very well designed.  They could empty the stands in 30 minutes.

 

We ate a sandwich somewhere and continued on to the church of San Clemente.  This was an interesting building because it really showed how Rome is made up of layers of history.  For example, around the 12th century AD San Clemente was built atop an abandoned church that was built in the 2nd century AD.  That church was built on top of homes of ancient Romans from around 1st century BC.

We went back to Santa Maria Vittoria to see Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa.  It was phenomenal.  The lighting wasn’t great so my pictures don’t do it justice.  For 50 cents you could light it and it was a nice effect but it confused my camera and all of those pictures are even more terrible.  Bernini was a true master.

Later we went to the Capuchin Crypts.  It had the feel of a Ripley’s believe it or not.  It was a bit cheesy and I even felt it was disrespectful.  All the Capuchin monks have their bones sent back to this crypt when they die and their bones are used to create scenes or sculptures.  I really felt it was in poor taste but if this is what these monks wanted done with their remains who am I to argue?

San Ignazio church was another interesting church.  They had designed and built a very large church but ran out of funds for the main dome so they built a flat ceiling there and painted an optical illusion of a dome.  It looked real when you walked in, and if you weren’t looking for it you would never notice it was painted.

After dinner we got hot chocolate at a place called Wanted.  Hot chocolate in Italy is great.  It’s like a thin chocolate pudding, you CAN drink it but you could use a spoon.  We went back to the Colosseum and forum and took a few pics after dark.  The last pic at the forum is probably my favorite shot I took in Rome.  After that we headed back for some shut-eye.

      

We got up a little early and took the high-speed train to Florence.  The train was quiet, smooth, and ran about 300 miles per hour.  If I could travel by this kind of train, I would choose it every single time over flying.  It was great.  We floated through idyllic countrysides with grassy, rolling hills and small stucco houses with wide spaces between.  The train was easy to use and it was a fantastic ride, highly recommended.  We got into Florence, dropped our stuff at the hotel and went to the Bargello.  (no cameras)

We saw Michelangelo’s Bacchus, Apollo, and his Brutus bust.  The Brutus was really intriguing.  If you looked at it from the  got a heroic sense of Brutus but if you looked at it from the side or back you saw something more sinister.  They had Verrachio’s coy and smirky David.  Donatello’s David and St. George.

We also visited the Duomo museum and saw Michelangelo’s unfinished Pieta.  Forlorn, I think it really impresses with a sense of sadness.  Nicodemus (with the face of Michelangelo) looks at Christ as though he were looking back on his life’s work.  The Baptistry doors were beautiful.

Then we went to the Accademia.  Michelangelo’s David is incredible.  It’s not really fair to try to describe it.  He stands proud, solid, confident.

They also had Michelangelo’s Prisoners.  I really liked the Prisoners a lot.  Much of Michelangelo’s work looks to me like it inspired Rodin’s work (Rodin is one of my favorite sculptors).  We got some food and hit the hay trying to rest up for tomorrow.

It’s Christmas day so we went to St. Peter’s square for the Pope’s blessing.  It was pretty busy.

Afterward, we walked back through Piazza Navona and got porchetta sandwiches.  Sold out of a booth on the street, they have a pig stuffed with rosemary on a spit.  They slice off a hunk and put it between bread slices.  Very tasty.  We split off of the main tour group with a few others in the hopes to see inside St. Ivo church but it was closed.  We somehow missed rejoining our main tour group at the meeting point.  So we went back to Campo de Fiori and saw the Bruno statue and tried to do our own walking tour of the Jewish ghetto.  It was a shame we missed our group for this because we had a lot of trouble finding the sites we were trying to find.  In the cobblestones they placed small bronze plaques listing the names of those who were taken to Auschwitz.

We had another giant dinner with the tour group that night.

 

Today we took a tour to Villa d’Este in Tivoli and Hadrian’s Villa through viatour.  Tivoli is a small hill town that sort of overlooks Rome (from a distance).  The villa was nice but the grounds were spectacular.  Over one hundred gravity fed fountains.

 

After Villa d’Este we went to Hadrian’s Villa.  Hadrian’s was enormous.  It was in ruins primarily due to looters.  It was an incredible estate both in size and scope.

 

After this tour we met up with the Rick Steve’s tour in Rome.  We started off with introductions etc. then did a short walking tour of the neighborhood before gorging ourselves at Bomba Ciccia.  Dinner was outstanding and a lot of fun- dinner is quite an event in Italy.

Since it was Christmas Eve, we walked to the Vatican after dinner to watch them place baby Jesus in the crib.  I’m told that in Italy, baby Jesus doesn’t get placed in the manger scene until midnight on Christmas Eve.  In any case, he had already been placed when we got there but St. Peter’s square was a sight to see.

Dinner was included with the Rick Steve’s tour and so was the wine, so many people at our table had lots of wine!  Jenn made friends and we ended up walking all the way back to our hotel helping this woman walk.  It was an adventure. On the way back, we saw Castel St. Angelo and a few other buildings that looked cool at night.

 

We also walked through Piazza Navona with the group and saw that a lot of people had witches in their windows.  Our guide explained that was the christmas witch who brings gifts to the children.

After breakfast, we headed to Piazza Navona.  Since it was so close to christmas, the plaza was a bit like a carnival with games and a merry-go-round.  Jenn got some roasted chestnuts.  (they were ok)

We continued on to Campo di Fiore, which held a farmer’s market this morning.  It seemed like it was the market all the restaurants came to for their produce.  The vendors were prepping tons of vegetables; artichoke hearts, ribboning vegetables, etc.  And they had enormous lemons!

Since we were in the neighborhood, we went to the Pantheon.  It was huge.  Much larger than I expected and more grand.

There were two guys playing metallica in the courtyard here.  One was playing a guitar and the other had a cello.  It was pretty badass.  We went on to Largo Argentina which had ruins of four temples, though now it’s overrun by cats.  We also saw Trajan’s Column.

Got up fairly early and took the Metro to Piazzo Popolo to meet our Pompeii tour.  We booked it through Viatour and it was run by Dark Rome Tours.  Since then, we have used Viatour a lot and have found them to be very convenient and usually very good tours.  Dark Rome did great job with the Pompeii tour and I would recommend it.  The tour started at the Pompeii Museum with artifacts from the city.  It was very modern looking stuff- utensils, serving dishes and medical tools.  They had Frescoes and Mosaics that utilized depth and perspective.

What is so interesting about depth and perspective in art from around 100 AD?  Look at art from the 1100s, a thousand years later, and you will find almost entirely flat looking art.  It just amazed me (from the very beginning of the trip) how much human knowledge was lost with the fall of Rome.  This Atlas was created around 100 AD and is a copy of a statue originally created in 200 BC.  In 200 BC they knew the earth was round!

As we toured Pompeii, we saw a lot of very interesting places.  This theatre had great acoustic properties.  You could stand at center stage and speak normally and be heard in almost the entire space.

A gladiator school:

A fast food restaurant, villa, and plumbing!

They had a brothel with a ‘menu’ board describing what you could buy.  Plaster casts of people that were found.  The only dog they found in Pompeii had been chained in his back yard (he would have vacated the premises otherwise)

You can see Vesuvius in the distance.

After we got back to Rome we went for a stroll and took bad pictures of Trevi Fountain and Piazza Barbarini.

After some delicious Gelato, we headed back to the hotel to crash.