Firenze 2006-2007: Roma

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Roma

This weekend, a group of about 20 of us went to Rome. The six of us guys who went all spent the better part of the weekend, so we would be in a smaller, and more manageable group as opposed to a huge group attempting to see all of Rome in about two days.
We all left on the 6:45 train from Florence, arriving in Rome shortly after 10. From there, John, Josh, Conner, Steven, and I went off to our hostel just a few blocks away from the station where we met Brenden. We dropped off our bags and then headed off to find something to eat. We happened upon the Hard Rock Café, so we ate lunch there before getting started. It was really nice to have some real American style food, and to have drinks with ice and free refills. After lunch, we went to the Spanish Steps where we looked around for a while before heading to the river, seeing Castel San Angelo, the Vatican from a distance and other things in that area of the city. After that we headed to Piazza Navona to see the fountain representing the four great rivers of the world, it was under restoration which meant it was all covered in scaffolding which was a bummer, but we still got to look around the piazza. We then headed to the Pantheon where we looked around, I saw the inside of the Pantheon for the first time, including Vittorio Emmanuel’s tomb and others vital to the construction of the modern Italian nation. After that we went to the Trevi Fountain, threw our coin in, took all the pictures we wanted and then walked to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We walked all over that piazza and the monument, walked to the top of the building for a great view, and then headed through the ruins of the Forum to the Colosseum. It was beginning to get dark, so we couldn’t spend that much time in the Forum. We made it to the Colosseum, ran into Liz and Anna, so we walked around with them some, eventually getting dinner at a place I remember eating at in 1997 near the Colosseum. After a pizza, we got crepes and headed back in the direction of the train station and our hostel. We walked over to the place the other were staying, hung out there for a bit and then went back to our own room to get to bed fairly early.
The plan for the next day was to get up really early and make it to the Vatican Museums before there was any kind of line that we’d have to wait in. That didn’t really happen for us. We all got up early but after showering, eating breakfast and just getting all our stuff together, it was about 9:30 by the time we finally reached the long, long line to get into the Vatican Museums. We found the girls waiting in line about a mile from the entrance, and they told us that they’d been there since 7:30. We finally got inside and Steven and I broke off from our huge group that was hard to manage once inside. Steven and I slowly made our way through the museums, seeing all the Ancient Egyptian and Greek statues and mummies in the case of Egypt. From there it changes to chapels that various Popes had designed throughout the centuries, halls with enormous tapestries, and then finally the sala di Rafaello, or the Room of Raphael. Here we saw his School of Athens which is one of the most famous pieces of art the Vatican owns. After taking that in, it was only a few more minutes until we were in the Sistine Chapel and angling our necks in weird positions in order to take in the whole of the ceiling. After snapping some pictures of the ceiling and Last Judgment we stood in awe of how that could have been done, and then moved on. After that, it was just the library that we walked through before exiting the museums and heading in the direction of St. Peter’s Basicilia. We made it there and at once found that there was something going on. Steven and I went in the church, saw Michelangelo’s Pieta right away, and then headed towards the center of the church where there seemed to be a lot of people trying to get a good look at something. We made our way up there and saw that everyone was trying to get a good look at the service going on. We think we saw the Pope presiding over a mass, but were not close enough to tell for sure.
After taking in the rest of St. Peter’s, we headed out to lunch and then back to the Spanish Steps/Trevi Fountain area to look around a bit more and see what we could find to occupy a few hours. We ended up finding a church that supposedly had the head of John the Baptist in it, so we took some pictures of that and headed back to one of the main pedestrian walkways with shops on it. We walked along it, ending at the Piazza del Popolo. At that point it was time for us to head back to the Trevi Fountain to meet the rest of the group for dinner. All twenty or so of us met and went to a trattoria not too far from the fountain for a birthday dinner for Natalie. We took up the whole of the back room and had a great time.
We all headed back in the direction of the train station after dinner and got tickets to return to Florence. We then had to get the subway out to Tiburtina and wait for our train to come. When it did, we noticed that it was extremely crowded, so when we finally managed to find seats, we were forced to share a compartment with an old man from Arezzo. He had been in Rome for the day to take part in the communist rally that we saw taking place near Termini station. We asked him about it, and he explained quite a bit to us before it came time for him to get off the train and head home. We slept the rest of the way and ended up getting back to the villa at like 3am.
On Sunday, I went to café liberta, but apart from that, it was a fairly uneventful day. It was mostly occupied with naps and homework, and greeting people home from their various travels.