Rome: A Pictorial

Posted by beth on November 13, 2009

Hooray! Ok, here we go. We arrived in Rome on Friday evening, and when we arrived at the train station, all we knew was that we were looking for the Hotel Madison, and that its address was 60 Via Marsala. We looked at a map and saw that Via Marsala ran right along the outside of the station, so we walked out and wondered which direction we might have to go to find #60. We didn’t have to wonder long, though, as it was literally right in front of us.

So we checked in to the hotel and went up to our room. It was clean and warm and had four twin beds and a bathroom. We also got continental breakfast included, and it came out to about €30 per night per person, which is not far off from what you’d pay for a hostel but SO much nicer and extremely convenient. We were pleased.

We were meeting up with some people on the other side of town, but having realized that Rome is surprisingly not that widespread, we decided to walk. I didn’t take any pictures that night, though, because it was dark, and I knew we’d be seeing it all again the next day. Which I did. Behold:

We decided to hit up Vatican City and the Sistine Chapel first thing because we knew the lines would be long, and the chapel closes just after noon, and I was NOT ABOUT TO MISS IT AGAIN, DANGIT. So we went to St. Peter’s Basilica (in the background of this picture), where the Pietà is. And just to make everyone feel like they haven’t accomplished anything, here’s a fun fact: Michelangelo finished carving the Pietà when he was 25. I’m willing to bet, though, that he was never on a competitive jump rope team. Take THAT, Michelangelo. Anyway, here it is.

Freakin’ Michelangelo.

Anyhoe, after St. Peter’s, we found out that in order to go into the Sistine Chapel, you have to pay to go into the Vatican Museum. And then you have to walk ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL the way through the museum to get to the chapel. Now, had we arrived earlier, or had the chapel been open later, we would have taken our time to see all that the museum has to offer. But we didn’t, and it wasn’t, and you couldn’t go back to see the stuff you missed in the beginning, and we had other things to see anyway, so we basically jogged through the whole museum just to get to the Sistine Chapel, where we weren’t allowed to take pictures. But we took a few anyway.

On the way out of the museum, there’s this awesome staircase designed (as far as I can tell) by architect Giuseppe Momo. It’s a double helix with one “strand” for going up and the other for going down. It is, quite simply, so cool.

Now, as I have alluded to before, there is not much in Europe that really resembles what I think of as being Chinese food. There are “Chinese” restaurants, but they are few and far between, and even if you can find one, it’s not really worth it. If you have any suggestions for me, I’d love to hear them, but so far, I’ve found nothing. So we were determined to find some non-Italian food in Rome, and when we left the Vatican, we were on a mission. A mission that ended up failing and putting us at a little…oh I guess you’d call it a bodega. It wasn’t even really a restaurant. I don’t know, but at the end of our meal, the guy was asking if we wanted coffee, and since I don’t drink coffee, he suggested that I have some hot chocolate. I had not had any hot chocolate here yet, so I decided to give it a try, and y’all. It is amazing. It was like hot chocolate pudding, all thick and sweet. I think we could have had two cups each, but we didn’t. We were saving up for gelato.

After lunch, we went to the Piazza Navona, where local artists sell their work. Some of it was quite good, but most of it was wholly unoriginal. That doesn’t make it bad, especially for a souvenir, but it was almost all paintings of the Colosseum and St. Peter’s, and I was not interested in paying that much for them, so we moved on.

Tracy and I headed over to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum next. We didn’t have time to go in before it got dark, so all my pictures are of the outsides. Oh well, I’ve seen them before. And now you can too!

And thus endeth my photos of Rome. The next morning, we went to the Spanish Steps and Cafè Greco (where kids like Keats and Goethe and Liszt and Wagner used to hang out), but it was all rainy, and they were setting up for an event in Piazza Spagna, so everything was covered in scaffolding and speakers and stuff. It’d be prettier in the spring anyway.

After that, we just sort of wandered around, did a little shopping, and headed back to the hotel to pick up our stuff and get on the train to come home. It was lots of fun, though, and I’m thinking I’ll probably go back for another day or two on my way home. I fly out of Rome anyway, so I might just go up a little early and do some more sightseeing/shopping. Any requests and/or recommendations?