Rome Day Two

In an attempt to just get this written so that I'm up to date, I'm going to try to keep this brief.  I've been procrastinating writing for the past three days because it seems like I have a lot to catch up on so rather than agonize about it further, I'm going to take the Band-Aid removal technique into hand and just do it... fast. 

Last post I discussed Monday, our long first day in Rome next up is Tuesday the 8th, which was a half day.  We met in the lobby of Hotel Tiziano at 8:30 after satisfying our hunger at the hotel's ample buffet breakfast of cereals, fruits, ham, cheese, bread, a variety of pastries and beverages.  Not the best spread I've seen but certainly varied.

Our locations for the day were all on the south side of the Tiber river in the Trastevere area.  Before getting down there, though, we stopped a couple blocks away from the Campo di Fiori to look at the facade of a building and I discovered my first Roman film crew.  According to a guy wearing a vest emblazoned with something like Hollywood Special Effects team, it wasn't a film shoot, merely something for publicity but it looked like a lot of setup for a publicity op.  They even had one of the giant fill lights that look like orbs and are used to light up the park at night during ACL. 

The first real stop was Santa Maria in Trastevere which was the home of many beautiful mosaics by Pietro Cavallini.  The ceiling was not lit very well but with my 1.8 lens on a half second exposure I was able to see the actual brightness of the ceiling's gold leaf and the panels filled with pink, green, and blue.  There was also a really nice statue of St. Anthony of Padua with notes all over it containing, I'm guessing, prayers and requests to the saint.

After that, we went over, very briefly to San Crisogono, a small chapel with beautiful floors and a dead lady in a glass box, like Snow White but old.  I think we found out later that she'd died in the mid1800s and was beatified in 1920.  She had a small altar and while we were there, a priest was holding a mini mass for about eight people.  At first I thought it was a funeral so I thought it would be impolite to take photos.

The last stop that day was Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.  It's choir loft houses a beautiful Cavallini fresco of the Last Judgement but getting to it is a bit of a challenge.  It requires talking to the nuns who live there (under a vow of silence) and getting permission to go up, eight at a time in their little elevator to see it.  It was worth it, as it was very pretty and the view down into the main section of the church was nice.  They also sell beautiful cards and nice lavender soap (I think they make them themselves) so I bought a brick of the latter.  Even just sitting in my room it perfumes the air.  The photo is the ceiling in the church but I'm not sure who painted it.

That was it for the class stuff that day.  I joined Ann and her boys and Lawrence for lunch at a small place that Ann was familiar with from her previous trips in and it was very good.  After that we walked over to the hotel that Lawrence will be staying at when he returns to Rome with his wife so he could show us (Ann) one of his favorite restaurants.  It looks like a nice spot and it might be interesting to find again.  I don't remember what it's called but I think it's something like "The Cistern".

After that, we took the tram back to the hotel and, after sitting around contemplating what to do with myself for the rest of the day, I went off on my own to explore.  I ran into a tiny gelateria on a back street who knows where and grabbed my gelato for the day, lemon and frutti di bosco, I think... and wandered around taking photos down driveways and into courtyards.

I managed to find a couple of big things to cross off my list including the Trevi Fountain (which was swamped with people, mostly tourists, mostly eating the expensive gelato sold right in the square around the fountain).  I found this Japanese woman amazingly diverting, as she was wandering around with three cones (with mini cones on top) in her two hands, looking for her family so that they could claim them as their contents melted down to her hands as it was very hot that day.  It was a great place for people-watching.  People contorting themselves in odd positions to get the right photo, a priest in a long white robe carrying a backpack and roller blades, and kids, bored at looking at old stuff (I'm guessing here).  I found them all much more interesting than the fountain, but here's a photo of it for good measure.

My next goal was to find the Spanish steps as they're just a bit farther north than the fountain but I wasn't trying very hard to get there in a direct manner, mostly just wandering wherever it looked interesting to go.  As I was standing at a large intersection getting my bearings, I saw a parade of cars pass, the first of which was flying the Chinese flag.  I'm guessing the ambassador or something like that was headed off, followed by about 7-8 other cars.  I went off in the right direction and found myself going up a slight incline, waving at people I passed and  ran into one of the four or so Aveda salons in Rome... which is situated, interestingly enough, directly at the top of the Spanish steps themselves.  The steps were nice but I didn't find them nearly as nice as the steps in Paris up to the big cathedral where the scavenger hunt in Amelie was filmed, as they don't go up steeply enough to actually see the full flight of steps from the base.  To see them properly requires being on the 4th or 5th floor of the buildings facing them (I'm guessing, anyway).

I wasn't aware that the area around the Spanish Steps was the high-class shopping district in Rome or the home of the Plaza hotel... but it is.  I wandered around, window shopping and wishing I had the money for the beautiful jewels in the shops and telling myself that it didn't matter that I didn't have the money as I didn't have anything to wear them with.  Oh well.  Apparently the Cow Parade is in Rome... again (?).  I found two of them near the base of the Spanish Steps and a few others around later on, one of the ones near the steps was cloud patterned and had a swastika carved into it (by someone other than the original artist, I'm guessing).

As I wandered through the high-class shops, I ran into what appeared a retrospective of police vehicles in Italy including an old car, motorcycles, and even a new SWAT type van with one of the iRobot (makers of Roomba) bomb robot things.  It looked like they were preparing for a big event.

The shop windows and displays are beautiful in Rome, an art in themselves.  Ties are artistically curved to show off their sheen and patterns and placed with careful attention paid to color coordination with the others in the display.

I arrived at the area in front of (what I later learned to be) the Parliament building to see a small gathering of people waiting around a smaller group wearing all black with black and white patterned scarves around their necks and heads, with "PALESTINE" embroidered on them in red, green and black lettering.  I wasn't sure what was going on, but I felt it would be interesting to stay and watch and see what would happen.  

What ensued was a dynamic performance by fourteen men and women discussing the state of things in Palestine, individual stories of Palestinians, and occasional bursts of song.  It was performed primarily in Arabic and Italian and only occasionally in English but the performance was enough to understand the idea of the stories without necessarily comprehending the meaning of the words.

The performers were diverse, though most appeared to be in their twenties or thirties and they were lead by an older woman who spoke both Italian and English and (presumably) Arabic who spent much of the performance sitting in the audience, watching.  Each of the members played a role, speaking a story or translating it from Arabic to English or Italian.  The performance moved through a variety of emotions; sorrow, joy, despair, anger, betrayal, hatred, fear, hope and love.  

I sat through it all, taking over 200 photos of the performance.  At the end, they joyously paraded and danced around their "stage", hopeful for the future of Palestine and its people.  They ran through the audience handing out more of the scarves they wore.  I got one while I was looking through my images, placed over my shoulders by one of the performers with a thank you.

After that, I wandered back in the direction of the hotel, called Ann as she'd been talking about this restaurant that, for 15 euro, gives you a huge anti pasta selection she was planning to go to that night so I could find out where they were and if they were still going.  Some of the other students had been talking about going, so I thought there'd be more people.  Ann and her sons were waiting with Lawrence in the Piazza Navone for one of his old students to join them for dinner.  I found them there and, after waiting a bit longer, we headed for the restaurant without him.  It was tons of food but I didn't think it tasted nearly as good as what the huge tables of Italians around us were having smelled. Oh, and on the way to the Piazza Navone, I saw my second film crew for the day.

After that we went to my second gelato stop for the night, a small place near the Pantheon that had really good gelato.  I think I had strawberry and peach.  That's a guess.  Afterwards, I headed back to the hotel and went to sleep.