Rome for Less Than a Day

In these two photos you see the juxtaposition of the ancient, the old, and the new that is Rome. The top photo was taken on Via Arenula near our hotel. After our breakfast on Wednesday morning 16th May, we had about 2 hours in which to walk about and see as much as possible before checking out of the hotel and taking a taxi to the airport for our flight home. Via Arenula is on the western side of Rome very close to the River Tiber. Without benefit of a guidebook, we simply wandered a bit to the east, then the south, north and so on, until we had covered a small square area near the hotel. After we got home, we consulted our Insight Guide to Italy section on Rome to see where we had been. In fact, we were quite well-placed and managed to see quite a bit in a short period of time, considering that we slept through 8 or 9 hours of the short stay and ate through about 2 more hours of it.

We were fortunate that our last day was bright and clear. Here are some of the sights we managed to see and photograph more or less in the order in which we saw them.

First, statuary from the Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel Monument) completed in 1911 to the honour of the first king of Italy. There was scaffolding all over the front of this massive white building (sometimes called "the wedding cake"--a name that will give you a good idea of its, ahem, style). Next is the Piazza Venezia which forms the center of modern Rome. You can see that work is being done to buildings here as well. The column you see in the second photo is Trajan's Column which is adjacent to St. Mark's Square. It was tough to move away from this area but we were so limited in time that we simply had to say "We'll see that on the next trip."

On the left is the entrance to the Jewish Museum at the edge of the old Jewish ghetto. Across the road from this building was the Tiber River with a number of small bridges. We crossed over and took this photo of buildings near Ponte Rotto.

We walked along the left side of the river until we came to a place where there was an island in the middle of the river with buildings on it.We learned this is St. Bartolomeo's on Isla di Tiberio. We crossed back over the river at Ponte Garibaldi and that put us back on Via Arenula, but as we were on the bridge, we had some excellent views of domes and statuary sticking up above the tall leafy trees. With his extra zoom lens, Don was able to take these two photos.
The statuary is from the Vittoria and the dome matches the photo in our Insight Guide of St. Peter's dome, which might be correct as we were were in the vicinity of the Vatican, although it was too far for us to walk there, see anything, and walk back.

We explored another section of "our neighbourhood" and came upon this gorgeous statuary in the inner courtyard of an apartment building.
Not far from that building, we came upon the only fountain we managed to see in Rome.

There were ruins everywhere. You'd turn a corner, and there would be a few upright columns and many plinths and broken columns on the ground. Seldom were these identified by any sort of sign, possibly because it has never been determined precisely what they were. One that was identified, however, was quite extensive--Via di Torre Argentina.

We have never been over-fond of crowds and thus tend to stay out of cities. For this reason, we had been avoiding Rome. Now we know that Rome will be do-able for us. We are certain we'll be making this trip again and this time to stop in Rome for 3 days or so before going on to Naples and Ischia. We are looking forward to the opportunity to see more of Naples, including Pompeii and Herculanuem. Early to mid-May appears to be the best time to go. The weather is pleasant but not too hot and because school is not out anywhere yet, there are not hordes of tourists to content with. The joy of being retired is being able to take trips at any time and so we will take advantage of that.

We now return you to the regularly scheduled blogs about the other aspects of retirement--golfing, the garden, sewing, socializing with friends, and so forth. Soon we'll be opening The Rowans B&B (i.e., receiving our scheduled guests). We hope you've enjoyed our Italian travelogue.