ROME!!!

Alas, we’ve been home from our vacation for a week now. With the trip behind us, we both suddenly realized how little time we have left before the baby comes, and that we need to get moving on prep stuff!

But back to Rome. Ah, Rome! It was a lot of fun. It was also hot, and a lot of walking. We both got plenty of exercise as we wandered the streets. Everything’s very compact, but you still have to go quite a ways to connect the dots. I likened it to Vegas--if you’ve ever walked any distance on the Las Vegas strip, you may have told yourself that your destination isn’t very far away (oh, that’s only two hotels away!) but the massive size of the resorts on the strip means that walking two hotels is the equivalent of 4-6 city blocks. Rome felt like that.

This photo of me with my belly protruding is in front of the House of the Vestal Virgins in the Foro Romano (the Roman Forum--basically the government district for ancient Rome.) The vestal virgins served an important purpose in the cult of Vesta (goddess of the hearth): they had to keep the communal fire going no matter what. They would serve for 30 years--10 to learn, 10 to practice, and 10 to teach the next generation. They were also given great privileges in a society where women didn’t have many. However, if they failed to remain virgins they could be buried alive.

This is inside the Colosseum. There’s only a small portion of seats remaining, which you can see between us. You can see the remains of lots of corridors that would’ve been below the floor for use in transporting gladiators and animals, or to flood the arena for naval battles. They’ve reconstructed part of the floor, so you can see the level that would’ve been at. Behind Dean on the first level is where the emperor would’ve sat, and behind me is where the senate would sit. The large entrance between us on the floor level was the winner’s arch, where the gladiators would make their entrances and those who survived would exit. There’s another arch underneath where we took this photo that was the loser’s arch, through which they would remove the bodies. It’s hard to imagine this place completely filled with seats. Hardly any of the arches would’ve been visible from the inside.

It was neat that so many famous sights were visible from the patios of restaurants all over the city.

Unfortunately you can’t see the dome in this first photo--we couldn’t really get far enough back to really get a good shot of it. This is the Pantheon, and it has the largest dome ever built before the development of reinforced concrete. They say it looks really neat inside while it’s raining, and you can watch the water pour in the hole in the middle. It didn’t really rain while we were there, though. The Pantheon survived and is in such good shape b/c it was converted into a Catholic church. The artist Raphael is buried here. We didn’t get many good photos from the inside, b/c tripods seem to be illegal in Rome. Most of the sights we went into told us we couldn’t use tripods, (they even made us check it at the coat check at St. Peter’s!) which was very annoying. It’s nearly impossible to get a good photo of the inside of a church when the lighting is too dim to work without a flash but the things you want to get a photo of are too far away to be lit up by a flash (or they’re telling you you can’t use a flash either.) Dean couldn’t get as steady of shots as he wanted on the video camera either.

This photo is of me in front of the Madonna del Parto (Madonna of Childbirth) in the church Sant’Agostino. The image is considered the protector of women in labor and is revered by expectant mothers. Going to some of these sights was very moving.

This is St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in the world and the center of Catholicism in Vatican City. We tried to see the pope, but he wasn’t here. Ppbth! We’d heard that he would celebrate a public mass every Wednesday at 10:30, and the tour book said it was free but that you needed tickets b/c of space availability. We tried to see if our resort could fax a request for us but they had trouble with that. One person there also told us she thought the pope was out of town. We weren’t able to get to the Vatican before Wednesday, but we did get online and looked at the Vatican’s website, where we thought it said the pope WOULD celebrate mass on the 13th. So we got up early and managed to get there around 10:00, but when we got to an information point and asked if we could still see the pope, the woman told us that he was at his summer home in northern Italy. That was disappointing.

The church, however, was quite amazing. Nearly every surface was covered with artwork. As an American, I’m used to churches with one altar, but St. Peter’s had numerous side chapels all over the place. I still don’t know what they would all be used for. We spent some money in order to climb up to the top of the cupola (550+ steps.) Boy, was that a workout! Once you got up into the dome, the walls curved inward so you had to lean over as you climbed. The view from the top was spectacular, though. We learned that St. Peter’s is, by law, the tallest building in Rome, which meant that no other buildings could crowd the view. This photo is on the roof about halfway up. If you zoom in, you can see a crowd of people hanging over a railing at the top of the dome.

This picture is of Michelangelo’s Pieta. It’s the only work that he ever signed, b/c when it was unveiled he was only 24 and people didn’t believe so young an artist could’ve created it. We saw the Sistine Chapel, too, which was in the adjoining Vatican museum. The image on the Sistine Chapel is actually copyrighted by Kodak! Kodak made a deal with the pope some years ago that they would clean the ceiling if they would be granted the copyright until 2020. (It was in dire need of cleaning b/c for the first 400 years of its existence it was lit by tallow candles, which left cooking grease all over the ceiling.) We also went into the crypt, where we saw the final resting place of Pope John Paul II and the tomb of St. Peter (the first pope) which the high altar was built directly above.

This is Dean and I taking a bath. Well, we were in the Terme di Caracalla, anyway--the most luxurious of the imperial baths. I was actually surprised that they let us walk into this room, b/c the tile is still on the floor. The complex was huge, and I kept trying to picture a modern health club here. Except with everybody naked.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. This was us eating our final gelato as we waited for the shuttle to take us back to the resort on our last full day there. The gelato (ice cream) was amazing--the fruit flavors tasted like they were made with fresh fruit (which I’m sure they were) and the more traditional flavors were incredibly rich. Yummy!

Zaxxon came in handy a few times, at least when it came to getting seats on buses and trains. The baby didn’t move much the first few days and I think I threw off it’s schedule by going 8 hours away. But by the end of the trip (just in time to go home and throw off its schedule again) it was moving around a lot. There was one evening we found a toy store in the Piazza Navona that was closed, and were thinking about coming back the next day to buy something for Zaxxon from Rome. Then Zaxxon started kicking, so I knew the baby wanted us to come back!