Category Archives: Italy

The Appian Way: Rome #2

(my first Rome recap here)

We decided to go to the Old Appian Way (via Appia Antica) on Sunday and walk around and see the sights. Back in the day, the Appian Way was the largest, widest, and fastest road in the world. It was begun in 312 B.C. and connected Rome with Capua which is near Naples. Eventaully the road stretched 430 miles to the port of Brindisi which is where boats sailed for Greece and Egypt. We read that the road was closed to traffic on Sundays but honestly, it didn’t seem like it was. Some places were more busy than others, but still…

I kept thinking of the Pines of Rome. My favorite movement.

The hotel (Hotel Suisse) serves breakfast in the rooms, and you get rolls, your choice of coffee/tea and your choice of orange juice or yogurt, which is totally weird. But the room service is nice, and the first morning the breakfast was a real treat!

After breakfast the four of us ordered a cab and headed to the Appian Way, which is outside the walls of Rome. We started with espressos at a little restaurant, and then headed down the road a bit until we encountered a place called “Capo di Bove” which apparently means the head of a cow.

The thing that I find most surprising and astonishing and amazing about Rome is how OLD everything is. There are ruins over ruins. Under some old building is another old building. It seems like everywhere you look there are old interesting ruins and archeological digs, and places that are 2000 years old. And yet people still live there, and go to work, and cook, and read, and have friends and families, and go for jogs, and do ALL the things we do, just surrounded and on top of thousands of years of history. It’s just amazing.

Capo di Bove
This particular collection of ruins was an area of ancient baths. People had literally just built over them.

There were some other sculptures and artwork on the grounds.

IMG_3372

Next we headed for the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. We looked around but decided against paying the admission to go in. Tombs and catacombs are out here because no one was allowed to be buried in the city walls. Christians preferred the catacombs because they wanted to be buried, whereas other…wealthy…people built tombs for their loved ones. Cecilia Metella was the daughter-in-law of Crassus, Rome’s richest man in the time of Augustus (around 30 B.C.).

IMG_3381

IMG_3383

We did go into the Circo and Villa di Massenzio. Admission was free but you needed to get a ticket to enter. It was strange. Anyway, the villa was the suburban home of the emperor Maxentius or Massenzio, who was eventually defeated by Constantine in A.D. 312.

IMG_3387
It’s sometimes hard to picture exactly what places were supposed to look like—this was evidently a large area where there was chariot racing and over 10,000 people could attend.

We wandered further down the Old Appian Way and found our way to the Catacombs of San Callisto. We managed to get there right as they were closing for lunch, so we decided to get our own lunch and then head back, as how cool would it be to go down into a catacomb? (Figuratively and literally, as the sun was really beating down on us.)

IMG_3398
Ran into this fellow, who is evidently the patron saint of altar boys. Well at least a statue of him.

We found a little cafe to eat lunch in and have espresso. We also purchased our bus tickets to get back home, since that seemed easy enough…

Catacombs of San Callisto

After lunch we headed back to San Callisto to tour the catacombs. We had to wait around a little bit but it wasn’t too bad. There were no pictures allowed on the tour so I don’t have any but it was very interesting! It was lovely and cool in the catacombs, and the tour guide was very informative. The only drawback was that since we seemed to be the first tour after lunch (tours were offered in various languages and we were in the first English one) it was a giant group and sometimes was hard to all fit in the same room as the guide. Evidently 9 popes from the 3rd century were buried in these catacombs, along with a variety of martyrs, including St Cecilia, the patron saint of music.

Anyway, after we finished up at the catacombs, we caught a bus to get to the metro to take it to the Spanish Steps. This did not go as smoothly as we might have hoped. First, the bus didn’t seem to go to the same place that the guidebook told us it would, so we needed to get off at an earlier stop. Then, the bus driver stopped even earlier and insisted that we and some other people get off the bus, that it was indeed the stop we wanted, even though we were really quite sure she was wrong…she refused to move the bus until we exited, so we did. We managed to find the metro station then, and THAT was our next adventure. We transferred at the Termini metro station, and our train was kind of like that train you might have seen on Youtube that’s in Japan (I think)…there are policemen using sticks to push the doors shut and cram the people in. For whatever reason it was super crowded, but we all managed to push and shove our way onto the train. So that worked well until we go to the metro station and then we went to the wrong exit—that was evidently my fault and was another series of unfortunate events and miscommunications. BUT we finally made it home and were able to rest up a bit before dinner!

We went to dinner at a restaurant Louie’s brother Julian found that had a lot of vegan friendly options called “Origano.” Julian is vegan and that was a bit of a challenge for him in Italy, but he was a trooper and ate lots of bread and grilled vegetables. The meal was quite good, though a little more casual than the night before. We ate caprese salad, pizza, and a delicious fish appetizer with raw fish and very thinly sliced lemons. After dinner Louie and I went out on our own to wander around a bit at night and found a place to have a glass of wine, before heading to bed.

spanish steps

(The Spanish Steps at night are amazing!).

I sat down to write this thinking I’d do more than one day, but I think one day at a time is enough, isn’t it? So many other things happening in my life now, which I’ll fill you in on soon (nutshell: I’m going to be in a play, playing violin, but as a character, and we are planning a road trip to various National Parks in August, and I’m back to playing violin soon, with a wedding tomorrow actually…) but I want to write about my trip before I forget! It’s amazing how the pictures jog one’s memory though 🙂

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will I blog about it in one day (rome #1)

I’ve been wanting to get started on some blog recaps of my trip to Rome but haven’t been quite sure how to go about it. Like most writing, the best way is probably just to sit down and get started!

We left on a Friday for Rome. This was a family trip with Louie’s family: his mom, stepdad, brother, and us.  We all got to the airport to check in for our flight, first to Detroit, then to Rome, and found out that Louie’s stepdad wasn’t going to be allowed to go. PSA: make sure your passport expires more than 3 months after your trip to Italy. Otherwise you have to fly to a one-day passport center, get your passport, and then meet your family later. With the weekend, that meant that he wasn’t going to be able to join us until Tuesday at the earliest, which was a huge bummer and got the vacation off on the wrong foot.  We were terribly sad to leave him behind, but there wasn’t a better option.

IMG_2509
(not so sad that we didn’t take a “we’re going to rome!” selfie. Is it a selfie when it’s of two people?

)

The flight was noneventful after that. We landed in Detroit and made an easy connection with the international leg of the trip. Louie and I were sitting together and tried to sleep mostly, but mostly failed at that. Oh, one of the good things we did on the airplane was request an “asian vegetarian” meal on the Delta Flight. It ended up being really tasty compared to what the regular meal looked like (and what I recall airplane food being.)

We landed in Rome in the morning. It’s odd after flying all night and trying to sleep and then feeling like it’s the middle of the night, when it IS, but it’s also the morning. All that to say, jet lag is no joke.

After clearing customs, and struggling to find out way out of the airport: welcome to Italy and all the signs for the exits point to exits that are closed…we made it to the cab line and took a cab to our hotel (we determined this was cost effective versus the train for four people).

We were spending the first portion of our trip at the Hotel Suisse at the top of the Spanish Steps. We arrived too early to check into our rooms but we were able to drop off our luggage and go sightseeing. And by sightseeing I mean, in desperate search of espresso.

caffe greco
Excellent espresso. Do have it at the counter, not at a table.
piazza del spagna
So many people out and about!

We arrived on a beautiful Saturday and I believe everybody in Rome was out and about plus all the tourists that had just arrived. We walked around to a variety of different piazzas and every one was just jammed with people.

marcus aurelius column
Column of Marcus Aurelius—okay this was slightly less crowded than the other areas, but mostly because it was really sunny.
pantheon
The Pantheon. We didn’t go in at this time because there were approximately 70 million people already inside.
pantheon square
The square around the Pantheon.
piazza navona
Piazza Navona.
spanish steps
The Spanish Steps covered with azaleas.

spanish steps

IMG_3342
Piazza del Popolo.

We walked up to the Villa Borghese then. (At some point we had gone back to the rooms to take a short nap and then headed out again. I had been so exhausted I thought I was going to throw up so this was very necessary for me. I felt slightly better after a nap and shower so was managing to hang on for more walking and dinner…)

piazza del popolo
View of the Piazza del Popolo from above

piazza del popolo

piazza del popolo

via gregoriana
Cool building on our street, Via Gregoriana. It is a library!

Anyway, after wandering all over the city, it was time for dinner. The first night we had a wonderful meal at a restaurant called Colline Emiliane. They make their own pasta and it was just wonderful. In retrospect this was actually one of my favorite meals! I didn’t take pictures of my food on this trip because it seemed tacky, so you won’t have that, but I had spinach and sausage stuffed ravioli, veal, lots of bread and a delicious Pinot Nero wine, among other things that I can’t recall. Italian food is just the best, isn’t it?

After dinner we went back to the hotel and crashed.

So that’s where I’ll end my first recap of the trip. I hope you’ll forgive me if I have decided to draw this out a little bit. I know that later I will enjoy looking back on my blog and reading them so this is the best way to do it! I might cover more than a day next time, who knows. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to 😉 and hopefully you will enjoy reading about my trip! There are three parts to traveling as far as I’m concerned: planning the trip, actually traveling, and then writing about it and looking at pictures afterwards.

Good Things Happening

The big news: I am going with Louie’s family on a trip to Italy in May. I am so excited! We will be going to Rome for sure and the rest is TBD. I’m so thrilled to be going to Europe again and feel so lucky!

Until then, life is crazy as usual. Thursday my quartet played a concert at the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. I had been really stressed out about it because we were playing about 7 pieces by student composers and they ranged from difficult to exceedingly difficult. We also played Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 8 (again) after all of that. The concert ended up feeling like it went really well, and the crowd was appreciative.

perseidkemper

As you can see it was a really neat space to play in, and we had a full house.

IMG_2343

The less good thing happening is that our white cat, Chloe, has been diagnosed with diabetes. Poor kitty. She has to have twice daily insulin injections, which has been a challenge. I’m sure it will become part of the regular routine (wake up, get attacked by loads of overly hungry animals who were sure they were going to die, feed animals, give Chloe a shot?) but it’s been one more added stress. She doesn’t seem to mind the shots other than an initial discomfort, and I’m sure that she must be feeling better than ever with the medicine!

So I’ve been doing an instagram challenge, taking/posting one photo a day. I’d read that it makes people become better photographers, or that it will change your life. Well, I’ve definitely become a worse photographer, because sometimes I’m at the end of the day and realize, oh no, I didn’t take a picture yet! Plus the added stress…did I get a picture today? Does stealing one from somebody’s facebook count? I guess I’m learning something about myself (that I mostly like to take pictures of my food and cats) (or that I’m pretty boring) and it’s a good challenge. I imagine I’ll look back on the year and feel super accomplished.

I did finally recover from my cold (look at me, following up on things) though I have had low-grade congestion all week. I’m thinking that it is allergies at this point: I feel mostly good, except a little tired still, but that gets better each day. This weekend I was able to do a fair amount of relaxing and sleep in one day. I’ve got some really fun performances coming up and so much to do before Italy, but I’m walking around in disbelief (something awesome happening to me!) and with lists in my head—I have been trying to stay on top of things by using my to-do list on my phone a lot, plus I totally made a packing list for Italy. I want to fit everything in my smaller suitcase and not overpack for once in my life, but I also don’t want to miss anything. And generally I don’t mind overpacking—for instance, if I’m flying to a destination where I will be picked up from the airport in a car, and then spend the whole time somewhere, I’d actually rather have brought too many clothes than not enough. I’ve often been in Phoenix and regretted not bringing more clothes or shoes. But this is different because it’s international travel, it’s possibly five people squeezing into a car with five suitcases, and that means to pack as light as possible.

Did I mention Rome?

I was there in the summer of 2001 for a couple of days. It was on a tour of Italy with the Erie Youth Symphony (speaking of lucky and amazing things happening to me—I just got asked to go along to fill out the section!). I just found these photos online at Snapfish and wondered at first why my albums only had 24 pictures in them…haha! That was back when photos cost money to see. I’m lucky I have them online! I remember trying to figure out how many rolls of film to bring along. What a wonderful trip though. I wish I’d been a blogger then or kept a better journal so I could reminisce more…well, things have changed now! You know you’ll be hearing all about Italy after it happens!