Day Fourteen - Day Two In Rome

We got a late start yesterday morning after having some difficulty locating either ( a ) a supermarket or ( b ) a decent breakfast place.  We eventually found some fuel to get going and headed for St. Peters Square.  It was our first trip on the Roman subway system and our first real encounter on this trip with massive crowds.  The day was going to be hot and long.

We got off the subway at St. Peters and walked into what has been our least favorite part of this trip.  The street from the subway to the Piazza was lined with all manner of people hawking all manner of goods and services, including private tours of the vatican, cheap luggage, sunglasses, and everything else under the sun.  The people selling were very aggressive, shoving things into our faces the entire way to the square.  Once we got to St. Peters, the line to get into the basilica was quite long.  As we took the time to look around, it was an amazing spectacle.  We happened to get in line behind this group of French tourists that were taking pictures every three steps.  Apparently they wanted pictures of each other from every possible angle in front of the church.  We were constantly getting people cutting in line because of the wide gaps they were causing, so I eventually got upset enough that I started to walk around them and get in front.  That seemed to put the kibosh on their picture taking for the time being.

We eventually made our way inside the church.  I can't begin to explain how massive the building itself is.  We had planned to make our way to the top of the dome, but the line for that was too long and moving too slow, so we passed on that.  The first part of the tour took us down into the crypt where all of the popes are buried.      We saw the grave of Pope John Paul II, the only pope I really remember in my lifetime.  There were people stopping to throw roses on his grave as we went past.  After a bit of delay, we made it up into the main sanctuary.  They had significant portions of it roped off, but we walked around the parts that were open and learned about the various points of important architecture.  Dominating the interior of the church is the eight-story bronze baldacchino, the papal alter.  The bronze to make the alter was taken from the pantheon.  This massive structure looks small in the context of the rest of the building, to give you some perspective on how large the interior space is.  There was also a mass happening in the midst of thousands of people milling about and taking pictures.  We saw people posing for pictures in confessionals and just about everywhere else.  After having been in cathedrals in other parts of Italy where silence was strictly enforced, as well as no picture taking, we found the scene at the root of Catholicism to be more than a bit strange.

We finished up our tour of St Peters with a few pictures from the outside.  We had decided to skip the Sistine Chapel before we got to Rome.  We got back on the metro after a quick lunch and went back to the apartment.  The kids were burnt out from a very late night the night before, so we spent an hour and a half or so letting them rest for a bit.

We then headed out for a night on the town.  We took the metro to Piazza Del Popolo and walked around there for a half an hour or so.  There was some definite sketchiness both in and around the piazza, and not much was happening, so we boarded a bus and went to Piazza Novana on our way to Campo D'Fiori.  We ate dinner at Trattoria Der Pallaro.  We had gotten several recommendations for this spot before our trip.  There is no menu at this restaurant.  You eat whatever they are making on that day, and the menu changes daily.  It is a four-course meal including wine, and it was easily the best meal of our trip.  We started the antipasti, which consisted of a plate of salami and some other meat that could have been pastrami or prosciutto.  We also had a plate of fresh fennel, some corn fritters ( or at least that is what they tasted like ) and a plate of spicy lentils.  The second course was a dish of two kinds of pasta.  There was a tomato pasta  and a butter pasta that had chunks of panchetta in it.  Both were delicious.  Following the pasta, we had a serving of what I would describe as pot roast, served with fresh mozzarella.  The last course was a healthy portion of pastry cake served with fresh strawberries.  It was an amazing meal.

We left the restaurant needing to walk off our food.   We wandered up the Via Del Corso to Trevi Fountain ( along with the rest of Rome it appeared ).  It is so nice to walk around Rome at night.  All of the monuments and things are lit up, making for some great scenery.  After leaving the Trevi fountain, we headed for the Spanish steps.  We made our way to the top which provided an incredible view of the top of the city.  It was 11:00 and our kids were about to drop over, so we jumped on the metro and headed for the apartment.

The day had started with a less than favorable experience at St Peters, but ended with a great night out, enjoying Rome at its finest.

Today we are going to Ostia Antica, and not sure what else.  We are meeting a friend of a friend there, who is  going to walk us around a bit today.

Until tomorrow...