Our next stop after Assisi was Rome!! To everyone that's seen Elizabeth's pictures by now, this might be a lot of repeats! Rome felt like much more of a busy city than Florence... That may be because it is a much busier city than Florence!! Though things felt a bit newer which might seem silly, but Florence has more of a old-time brick work to it while Rome keeps to the white marble pillars and sculptures. The buildings are much taller, a bit more intricate. Not to mention the city is waaay larger than Florence!! It's also much easier to get lost within Rome while you can walk from one end of Florence to the other in less than an hour. It seems like it could be a bit like going from Minneapolis to Chicago.
It of course had many of the same features, seeing as how it is still in Italy after all ;) The sculptures on all of the bridges and the fountains in the Piazzas were a familiar sight! I suppose what I'm getting at with these paragraphs is that Florence has become my home, it is much more familiar to me while Rome seemed so much bigger, so much whiter and busier! I can't even imagine what people from Chianti going to Rome let alone Florence must be like! It's probably so different!
Anyhow, we stayed in a hotel just on the edge of Vatican City and decided to explore Rome our first ay there and then visit Vatican the next day. I think we might have seen almost all of Rome in just that day! We covered a lot of ground!
Our first goal was to find the Pantheon which was gorgeous. Elizabeth mentioned right away that it seemed strange that there were old buildings such as this surrounded by the newer, tall, modern buildings. Perhaps that's why Rome felt so different than Florence: all of Florence is older and everything appears to match in appearance. As the day progressed, I grew much more used to Rome's mix of architectures from different eras and I quickly grew to like how buildings like the Pantheon stood out in the massive city.
I kept thinking of Craig Farmer's Art History class from Perpich. If anything stuck with me, it was Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian architecture in pillars!! Don't ask why, I just always am reminded of it when I see the old architecture of Italy!!! All of the Corinthian pillars in the Pantheon were beautiful! The interior too was gorgeous. We were allowed in for free which was fantastic! Everything inside was beautiful!
It was a bit odd, it appeared that there was a mass service going on while everyone was touring inside. It was neat to see a glimpse of the service nonetheless, though I never imagined during a service they would allow tourists in. There were beautiful sculptures every which way inside, though I'll spare you all of the photos I took!
We stumbled into the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II some time after our trip to the Pantheon. It is located just on the west side of Foro Romano which is, from what I've gathered, a large park with ruins of ancient buildings which have been preserved and saved to view nowadays. We walked around Foro Romano to (finally) find the Colosseum which was one of our main goals in the day!!
I'll admit, before we found the Colosseum we'd found a much smaller version of it called Portico d'Ottavia and we simply couldn't figure out what it was. After finding the real deal it seemed silly we couldn't figure out what the Portico d'Ottavia had been since the real Colosseum is massive! Even more stunning than I'd thought it be, honesty. We didn't get the chance to go in, something I definitely will want to do when I return to Rome for the outside is incredible, the inside must be just as intricate!
We stayed at the Colosseum for white a while. Afterwards as it was getting dark we headed back west to find Piazza Novona which we kept seeing on the map and wanted to take a look at it.
It was a really neat Piazza! A courtyard almost surrounded by buildings in an oval shape. The streets were lined with artists and venders selling pictures and paintings. We stayed there until it was dark, watching spraypaint artists work away on their art and wandering the Piazza. Rome is beautiful at night! The street lights are gold against an otherwise completely black night and especially along the Fiume Tevere you can see jut how gold the city is at night.
That's all for the first day, we had hit many more monuments and took many pictures though these were the big things we had seen!! I've gotten a little obsessed with feeding the pigeons over by the Duomo (I learned they're just as tame here as in Assisi when they want to be) so I've been outside a lot hanging out with the birds and sketching them while they flutter up to my sketchbook thinking I have more food for them than I do :) Second update will come soon!
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| I'm only uploading this one for the birds flying around!! |
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