Day 6 - Saturday 10 April - Rome

Up at 7am and went for a walk back around to the market - bought an orange - the market is still setting up at that time of the morning - stopped at the little bakery and bought ‘due croissants per favore’ - Euro 1.20 then stopped by the local coffee bar and had my first caffe latte standing at the bar - just like an Italian! - Euro 1.30 grazie… Found graham’s missing ipod - in the shorts pocket that he washed on Wednesday!!!!! The ipod is dead, but the earphones are still working - he will have to share my ipod on the tours we downloaded - off to the Pantheon today.

The Pantheon is the most remarkable structure - a still functioning dome which is used for church services now - it holds the tomb of Raphael as well as Victor Emanuel. There is a hole in the top which lets the rain in, but the drainage system is so ggod it doesn’t matter! The frescoes were truly beautiful and the place still has a sense of holiness, even though it was built for pagan gods. The dome was the basis for all the other types of domes built since then, from St Peters Basilica to the Capitol building in Washington. The other great thing was it was free to get in! We shared my ipod tour so we got a bit of the history of the building.


  Raphael's tomb.....

We headed up towards the Trevi fountain (now that we weren’t lost, there were signs everywhere!!!) When we found the Trevi, I almost burst into tears... What a magnificent fountain! No wonder it has such an aura - even with hundreds of people surrounding it, you couldn’t miss how gorgeous it was - so far, the best thing I’ve seen…… even if it is BIT over the top.....
 
 

 
 
After the Trevi we walked north towards Piazza Venizia - there is a monument to Victor Emmanuel and also this is a very familiar roundabout from all the movies featuring Rome as a setting…. The traffic is mad and you really do have to judge when to cross! Graham decided we should walk in tandem with one of the locals... we certainly took the advice of the previous tour guide - once you start walking don't stop!!! We sat in the middle on the grass to get a better view of the ‘wedding cake’ which is the monument and realised it is the white building we can see from our balcony.


 

Graham then wanted to look more closely at the Sacre Area - where Caesar was killed - again it was free, but being restored so you can’t get down into it - we had to be content with looking into it over the fence. Lots of cats here - they would give Nigeri a run for his money, they are so big! Apparently the Senate was meeting here instead of the Forum for some reason, so that's why Caesar was killed here and not over in the Forum.

We had a very simple lunch of meat and cheese at Cul de Sac, a little restaurant in Piazza Pasquino we read about in Authentic Rome and were entertained by two girls setting up a tap dance in the middle of the road! The cars and trucks went around them (sort of) and sometimes they had to move their gear, but they persevered! We didn’t have any change or we would have contributed to their fund…. One of the numbers they did was ‘Cabaret’ - not too badly, either!

Had a siesta after lunch and then went back to the local for drinks and to connect to the internet and let everyone know we are still alive! Dinner down the road - tried the fried artichokes - can’t say I’m a fan, but at least we tried them, also had fried vegetables which were better - Graham even liked the eggplant! Veal Scallopini for me, Pollo Cacciatore for Graham (not as tomato based as we expected and a bit stringy).