Italia 2017 - Roma Massive Day Part One

I am SURE you remember Wife and I in our post mortem from past trips have stated our need to recognize our age by cutting down on the amount of activities we try to do while traveling. It is good that you remember this because evidently in our age addled memory state we are completely oblivious to it. Hence we have a day such as we did on Monday where we do so much that we are exhausted and have taken enough pictures to require two full posts

WAIT! you say. What happened to Sunday? Ah Sunday was a cooking workshop on pizza and pasta making. Actually it should have been more correctly promoted as working with the dough of pizza and pasta (which is of course he critical element). As I was fully absorbed in learning, the photo-journalistic component fell to Wife who has put a post about it on her blog here. I do want to note that there are a lot of pictures of Wife on this post. Now unless Wife's camera suddenly became sentient and started to take pictures on its on, there was another photographer who was at work with her camera that conspicuously is given no credit on this post. NOT that I am complaining mind you, I'm just saying.

Back to Monday. We had identified one section of Rome that we were going to focus on. We had monuments and museums as part of the day.

We started off going the same route we did on Saturday so went by the Vittoriano once again

We were in more of a photo taking mode and I found a number of sculptures that caught my eye.

I made comment on Saturday's post about the Italian self-image as it applies to art (compared to the Albanian for example). I would love for someone to explain this allegory since this monument applies to the successful struggle to unify the State of Italy

Then we moved on to the Pantheon

The Pantheon is the largest building left standing from ancient Rome

It is renowned for its very light weight dome construction technique with no support arches visible from the inside. They are actually built into the dome. It is one of the things I clearly remembered from my college days trip to Rome. 

To be honest, I didn't remember the Pantheon as being all that wonderful from an artistic standpoint and I came away this time feeling the same

Here are some shots of Arches built into the walls

As we find so often here, there was art just around to be seen

A fountain in the piazza in front of the Pantheon

And this fresco on one of the buildings

There was a church that was just a block away that was highly recommended in our guide book

We had the hardest time finding it

Because it looked like this

The lighting was very dark so I couldn't get much in the way of pictures even with my low-light friendly Olympus

Next we headed for a museum that is an excavation of a Roman nobleman's home

Unfortunately it was closed on Monday

While on our way we found more ruins that are not in the guidebook but these date from the late Republic period, a period less popular in modern history but one I am very familiar with. There aren't many ruins that date from this time.

Cat contemplating the Fall of the Republic and the Rise of the Emperors

While searching for the museum we stumbled upon a courtyard. Have no idea what it was but there was a bunch of sculpture, particularly busts inside.

It was now around lunch time and we were in the Jewish Quarter. There is a significant Jewish history in Rome which I will cover next post. Jewish cooking also has had a big influence on Roman cuisine so I was anxious to try some. It had been raining on and off so we were glad to get inside. I did not take any pictures unfortunately of lunch.