Venice Digression & Rome on Our Own

We left Munich for Venice on Sunday, September 13th. The train route goes through Austria and the Alps. The mountains are stunning, and I wish I had taken more pictures. The route was so impressive that Trout would like to drive through all the Alpine areas -- during good weather of course.

This map is from planning the route using the DB Bahn's website. From the border with Austria to Trento, the signs were all in Italian and German. That's because this area frequently went back and forth between the two countries.


Bolzano is the main city, but the mountains were the big attraction to us. I looked all over for a picture of what we saw from the train, but the link will just have to do. This is the only picture I got, and it looks very German/Austrian.

We arrived in Venice at about 6:00 in the evening. It was sunny and warm. We took a vaporetto all around the grand canal to our B&B. Of course it was dark and we were tired and hungry by the time we arrived. And it was Venice -- narrow poorly marked streets for people only, but we finally found the place.

We called the owner and he came and checked us in, gave us our keys, etc. This was our room. We did have a private bath, but it was down the hall, so that was a bit of a pain, but we managed.

The reason there are so many links in this Venice part is that I only took those three pictures. We explored a bit the night we arrived. We planned to spend the whole day on Monday wandering around but it poured rain all day long. We took the vaporetto all the way out to Lido and back and were thankful we had good rain gear with us for walking around, but we ended up coming back to the room and going to bed early.

From the streets link above you can see that we were very close to Piazza San Marco and the Basilica, but we just didn't have the inclination to stand in the rain waiting to get in. Riding the vaporetto was fun in spite of the weather and we did manage to get lost on the streets, so we accomplished both of my goals. I just wish the weather had been better.

Tuesday the 15th we took the train to Rome. We arrived fairly early, got ourselves settled into our hotel and headed for lunch. It was a bit of a walk, but we ended up at this place for food at a time of day when many restaurants are closed. My Neopolitan pizza with anchovies was great and the tiramisu was the best I've ever eaten.

Trout loved the park job of the car beyond the moped. He was to see many more of those -- especially in Italy.

The outdoor seating was right in the street. That's very common.

This is a different restaurant in another part of town. They're protecting their customers with a potted tree.

That evening we walked around our "neighborhood" and tucked in early. The next day was a day on our own in Rome, and it was time to do laundry. So we did that first, had lunch and then started checking things out.

Our main stop was the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, built in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. The early work on the Basilica was done by Michelangelo.

Trout was fascinated by some of the exhibits inside the church.

The church faces the Piazza della Repubblica. This is a great place to see cars swirling around the circle and a hard place to cross the street -- which we did too many times to count.

I seem to take the exterior pictures last and then forget to rearrange them when I'm loading them in. Anyway, here's Trout in front of the Basilica. It looks very different from the inside, eh?

This is as we go around the building.

The baths museum adjacent is not the greatest, but we stumbled in anyway. It's filled with inscriptions and small pieces from excavations.

It has nice courtyards both out front and inside.

Look closely and you may see some a cat in this picture.

This is a very early Christian inscription. If I remember correctly, it is the earliest one found so far.

If you read the Rome with Ron posting already and clicked to the link about Mithras, you will probably recognize this image. It is very common in many works of art.

This was one of the most interesting parts of this museum for me. It was an exhibit of very early funeral urns, I think. But I'm not sure if they are recreated or original.

This is a part of the Baths of Diocletian, now being used as exhibit space.

This was a private bathing or dressing area. Images of various Roman Gods would be in the niches.

This is the ceiling of another private bathing or dressing room.

This is back outside showing more of the area being excavated.

On Friday the 18th, we took the Metro to meet our tour guide for the Vatican. Along the way we stopped at some tourist attractions. This are the Spanish Steps -- without and with Trout.

From there we walked past the Piazza Mignanelli with its column of the Virgin Mary.

We got out of the way of the fire truck.

And we reached the Trevi Fountain. It's supposed to be better at night, but we thought it was pretty good during the day.

We got back on the Metro and found our way to the meeting place for our Vatican tour. Fortunately we were early and were able to have some gelato before everyone arrived. Nutella is a big thing in Italy (as it is in our household). These were the largest containers of it we saw.

This was an "artisan" gelato shop so the flavors were all natural -- except maybe the Nutella. I got fig.

Rome with Ron

Although we spent 3 days and nights in Rome, we still opted to spend one whole day, September 17th, with a private guide, Ron in Rome. He's an American living in Rome with his wife. It was a jam-packed day from 9:00 in the morning until after 5:00 pm. We walked, took a bus and the Metro, and we were exhausted by the end of the day. We hit the highlights I arranged in advance with Ron via email, and it was great hearing about living in the city, warts and all, from a fellow American. One of the hassles is that he can't own a vehicle.

He came to our hotel which was quite close to the Roma Termini. Once again I opted for a reasonably priced location close to a central transportation hub. He took us inside the station, we bought transportation passes and we were on our way to our first stop. It was great having him take us around because we didn't have to think about or figure out how to get to places, at least on that day.

We were on a bus and we got to see some pickpockets at work. We were fortunate that we never experienced that first hand (in our pocket) anywhere on the trip. Ron pointed out one guy who got on, sized us up and moved to another part of the bus. The pickpockets tend to be very well-dressed men who speak pretty good English. A different one went behind us to get off, but he picked the wrong place to get off because his victims also got off there.

The pattern is for the pickpocket to do his job and then get off at the next stop, assuming that the victims won't notice their loss until several stops later. However, the Japanese tourists he hit figured out what happened right away. They got off the bus at the front and watched him go to the back. They were waiting for him when he got off.

It also happened that the stop was at a construction area where there were local cops and a local cop station, so one of the tourists ran to get a cop before the guy could get away while the others confronted him and yelled at him -- in Japanese, of course. The cop led him and them to the cop station and that's the last we saw because the bus continued on. The pickpocket seemed very nonchalant about the whole thing, and Ron said nothing would probably happen to him so long as he gave what he took back.

Our first stop was the Pantheon. I love this building. Dedicated to all the gods, it was originally built in 125 AD and was converted to a Christian church in 609. It is the most complete ancient building in Rome.

This opening in the ceiling is the same as it was 1800+ years ago.

The floor is amazing.

Here Ron tells Trout about the building and its history.

These photos are from the inside looking out of the entrance.


Some of the nice things about having Ron show us around were surprises that we could stop into along the way. This is the Baroque organ of a little neighborhood church near the Pantheon.


Also in the area was the home of Tazza D'Oro, famous coffee roasters. I took a potty break there, and it was awful. The shop was great, but the toilet facility, at least for women, was disgusting. I was glad I was carrying a roll of TP and wipes.

As Ron told us about where Michelle and the girls had gelato when the Obamas were in town, we walked through the Piazza Navona and the Campo de Fiori. The Wikipedia link has better pictures but these are mine.

This is the monument to Giordano Bruno, famous Italian philosopher and mathematician who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.

The market doesn't just sell flowers. It's the most famous market in town, but there are many others. After this one closes up, all these tents and stalls disappear and for a few hours the square is empty. Then as evening comes, the restaurants in the area set out their tables and it becomes a very lively nightspot.

This is a typical small and narrow street in the area.

There are constant archeological digs in Rome, and new finds occur regularly. This is the Largo de Torre Argentina.

On our tour, it was famous for two things -- a famous cat sanctuary...

...and the steps where Julius Caesar was killed.

From here we walked through the Jewish Ghetto.

The area is heavily protected and rumor has it that of any four young men you see in the area, one is Mossad.

This is the Synogogue. There are guard stations all around it, including one right behind where I was standing to take this picture.

Next we walked over the Tiber River to the Isola Tiberina. This is the oldest bridge over it, or at least the section on the right is.

Flooding in December 2008 brought the river up to just below the small windows in this picture and threatened the integrity of the bridges.

This is the bridge we walked over both directions.

Back in the main part of Rome, these are part of the buildings near the Theater of Marcellus.

And here it is. It may resemble the Colosseum, but it's the Teatro de Marcello, and those are aparments in the top. How cool would that be -- to live in a 2000 year old building.

I'd been to Rome twice before, but I never took the time to actually walk through the Forum, so that was a major part of this tour. We started with the Palatine Hill.

The Palatine Hill was the location of the homes of some of the emperors and other Romans of distinction. This was a special performance area just for them.

The construction of these buildings was interesting to us. Those holes in the wall were used to create scaffolding to build the wall higher. They put beams in the holes, lay the walkway along them and built their way up. When they finished all the work they started at the top and removed them on the way down. The holes were filled in and covered up and didn't reappear until the walls lost their marble coverings.

This is where the emperor sat to watch the show.

This is a close up peek at the wall painting toward the bottom center of the picture above.

This is some of the marble that sheathed everything. It's easy to imagine how this area would gleam in the sun when all the exterior surfaces were covered with white marble.

This is a peek at more wall painting inside the palace.

This was a garden in the bath area.

This was the children's bath.

This was a passage used to bring the emperor from the house to public areas in a secure way.

It's paved with tiny mosaics.

The walls are covered in very small stones.

It's amazing how some of the vistas seem so familiar. The trees are the same as in many paintings.

This is the burial site of Julius Caesar in the Forum. People still bring flowers to it.

The entire Forum is viewable from the Palatine Hill. This is the Basilica of Constatine. It was the largest building in the Forum and is now only about 1/3 of its original size. See how it compares to the people below the trees.

This is the Arch of Titus. It's the trimphal arch into the city. Roman soldiers would come through it after their battles.

It's pretty narrow, so it would take a long time, providing lots of entertainment for the people along the parade route.

The ceiling is covered in flowers, representing those that were strewn for the victors. One of their successful excursions was the sack of Jerusalem. On the right is a representation of them carrying off the spoils of their plunder.

The Romans were very advanced in the use of water -- in bringing it to the city, using it and disposing of it. This is an original sewer manhole cover.

This is a view down the main road.

These are parts of the Temple of Saturn. It is about 2500 years old. Saturn was a favorite Roman God.

And this is the stone that marked the center of the Roman Empire. Distances to Rome are still measured to this stone. The latin is literally "navel of the city of Rome" but for hundreds of years it was truly the navel of the world.

Once you've marched through the forum to all your screaming fans, you gotta go out another arch to officially end the spectacle. This Arch of Septimus Severus served that purpose.

This shows more excavation of the Forum. We just passed by this on the way to the Colosseum. The Forum is a prime example of how time, neglect and flooding can bury and hide the past. Apparently, at one time the Forum was a cow pasture with just a few odd stone things sticking up out of the ground.

So we left the Forum and headed down the street to the Colosseum. There was construction work going on to repair places like this in the road, one cobblestone at a time.

This mural showed the development of the Roman Empire over time, and these are some typical cars. The smallest car we saw was in London, but Rome had more small cars than any other place we went -- and way more motorcyles.

Now we're in the Colosseum. Just imagine an enormous football stadium that would seat 50,000 spectators. This wall shows some places where gates or marble or statues of gods were attached. The Wikipedia article has a great cross section of the levels of the Colosseum.

The spectators would walk under and through these arches. Imagine it with food vendors and all the same kinds of kitsch of a stadium of today. On the top levels there were even enormous cloth covers that could be adjusted to shade the spectators.

The "performers" would stay below the main level until time to come out.

This shows the white marble over some of the seats. This was not the nosebleed section. The people who sat here were of the higher classes.

Over time the building was quarried for the marble and brick, but these are original and restored areas.

These steps are gated off for that reason.

Here is Trout pretending he's about to go into the arena. The ground was covered with sand to soak up any blood from the activities there. Arena is from the Latin, harena, for sand.

Outside the Colosseum is this massive Temple of Venus and Rome. It was the largest temple in Ancient Rome.

Another good example of Roman engineering were these gutters inside the Colosseum. They carried rain water away so it wouldn't puddle or flood the seating.

Ron took this picture of us, one of the few of both of us on the trip.

Our last stop with Ron's guidance was one of my favorites in Rome. It's the Basilica of San Clemente. This was the best example of reuse of a sacred site we saw on the whole trip. It's a 12th century Christian church built on a 4th century Christian church built on a 1st century pagan temple to the Roman God, Mithras. The website has great still and video of the place. Be sure to go to the Tour link, click on the Levels from different centuries and then click on the high resolution pictures. I put links to some examples here. There are many more great pictures. No wonder they didn't want us to take pictures. This is one of the best websites I've seen for both information and creativity.

After San Clemente, we started to get on the Metro back to Roma Termini, but it was rush hour. The Metro was literally like those pictures you see from Japan where people are stuffing themselves onto the train. It was hot and the route we would take had no air conditioned trains. I told Ron I couldn't do it.

So we came out of the underground and took a bus. I thought it was a great tour. We definitely learned a lot and got our money's worth for such a short time.