More about Rome- my favorites

Walking the ancient road

 Two weeks ago in Rome it was Tuesday, my favorite day there. We used our Roma passes to get to Ostica Antica, the remains of the ancient Roman seaport (both the river and sea moved away from the area and it was abandoned.) We took the Metro to the Rome-Lido train, and got there as the site opened, it was us and  a group of French teenagers and a couple other people wandering around.  By the time we had walked the entire site, the rest of the tourists had arrived, and we ate our sandwiches and cookies we had packed in a backpack that morning, sitting on a curb, under the trees.

this was a tavern, see the wall frescoes and mosaic floor and  ovens...wow

Amazing mosaic floors in this courtyar

 Garry even found an interesting grinding mill in the bakery area, it was the highlight of our ancient places we visited because there wasn't a crowd to walk through, and so much to see.

Us by the sea!

After lunch we took the train a few more stops and found the sea. Garry did manage to get his feet wet, but it took some doing as there was a movie wedding scene being shot on the beach and boardwalk, we even walked past the actress playing the bride heading out of makeup to the beach.

We still had a lot of afternoon left and jumped off a few subway stops on the Metro to check out St Pauls, and  Pyramid stop which really has a pyramid! It looks new because it was recently fixed up, but was built almost 2000 years ago as a burial place when Romans were fascinated by Egypt and stuck around because it got built into the wall around the city. The castle-looking buliding nearby was a city gate and is a museum with many of the things recovered from the area we went to in the morning.

Not Trevi Fountain, but one with water!

We went back to the apartment for a couple hours and headed out to find Trevi fountain and some other sites as evening was coming. We found it, but it is under repair, so only saw tourists squeezing thorugh a walkway over it, so we continued on to find out where everyone was going and ended up at the Pantheon, and finding Marc Antony's column, and some fountains with water, and even walked around the backside of the Coliseum in our quest to return home, we hopped a bus to it and then took the Metro home.

more working fountains!

Marc Antony's column, as impressive as Trajan's 

The Coliseum again? It seemed we were finding it over and over

We topped the evening off with dinner at the sidewalk cafe around the corner from the apartment around nine pm, most nights I cooked stuff we picked up at the grocery store, so it was a real treat to eat pasta outside with a violin playing, too.












Of course, the highlights of Rome for me was the art I had wanted to see since high school, After 15 minutes of looking up at the Sistine chapel ceiling, Garry asked if I was ready to go, and I whispered back no, and made him wait another ten minutes. I found out that Michelangelo's Moses sculpture was in a church and made Garry wait for more than an hour Saturday afternoon when it was closed when we got there before two (St Peter's in Chains is really hard to find, the map was not a lot of help, we missed it in the morning and it was closed from 12:20 to 3 pm) We got reservations tickets online for the Borghese Gallery Friday and it was wonderful, even Garry enjoyed it and we spent most of the day walking in the surrounding park, which was lovely.

Disappointing distance between the Pieta  and me at St Peters

ceiling Vatican museum- look up people!

ceiling Borghese Gallery

David sculpture

amazing ceilings

bottom - by Leonardo Da Vinci

worth waiting for- Moses bottom center