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.

We arrived in Rome around 8 in the morning and got a shuttle to take us to the hotel.  It was only few bucks more than taking the train and we didn’t have to try to think much (which is good after a long international flight).  There were ruins everywhere we looked, and I was pretty excited to have finally made it to Rome.

We rested at the hotel before heading out for lunch- pizza at a nearby pizzeria.  I thought it was pretty good, it reminded me of the pizzas I make at home on the grill.  After lunch we stopped for some groceries and made our first visit to an Italian Pharmacia.  It’s very interesting checking out foreign pharmacies as they have things we don’t.  Went to the metro station to get an idea what to expect for tomorrow since we have to be in Piazzo Popolo fairly early.

Later, we went to Santa Maria Maggiore and sat through part of an Italian sermon.  I was anxious to have pasta in Italy, so we went to il Pasticucciola for dinner.  I had carbonara and it was very good.  (of course it was good, it was carbonara)  Practically had to fight off the guy trying to sell me a rose.  That got kind of aggravating, we were eating dinner.  Oh well, lots more of those guys to come.