Staggering Rome!

Yesterday began in the sleepy morning Piazza del Populo. Piazzas in August are full of life but not until later in the day when everyone comes to "hang out," locals and tourists co-mingling in the sheer joy of warmth, people watching, eating, shopping for art, and so on. Our group of 20 was stuffed into a small bus for The Angels and Demons Tour of Rome. We have chosen tours offered through Viator so most of our group members are not Americans -- Brits, Australians, Europeans with good English -- but not Americans. We try not to be confused about this. There seems to be more respect, as ever was the case here in Europe, for Canadians.

Tourism is amazing -- we waited quietly at the back of the small baroque Santa Marian della Vittoria church with our group's small children being very well behaved as we had found ourselves attending a small funeral which reminded us that life goes on as usual for the congregation of these small but magnficent churches full of treasures of art. We saw obelisks, statues by Bernini, the Pantheon, and more ... then left the bus for our coffee break and a quick walk through the back alleys and small streets of medieval Cientro, the centre of Rome, as we headed into the Castel Sant'Angelo where the book puts the assassin and the undaunted Robert Langdon in direct conflict. Nice group and interesting tour ... but Mike, the young Italian American tour guide who had grown up in Rome, could have done with a lesson I often gave grade 8s which is to avoid plot summary! We were, after all, really there for the history, but his keen and youthful enthusiasm for the plot more than captured our interest and, although most of us had read the book or seen the movie already, we were soon keen to hear his running interpretation. But it was fun. Several group members had disappeared before the Castel Sant'Angelo as the tour was long, the climb an added challenge, and it had been billed as a three-hour (not five-hour) tour. We were hungry but late now for our much coveted 3 pm booking across the other side of town.

The challenge to get to the Villa Borghese -- no, the Galleria Borghese -- was by now easy for us. Metro from Castel Sant'Angelo, attached by wall disguised as aqueduct to the Vatican, as you will know if you have read the book, back to Piazza del Populo but that's only to the Villa Borghese which is quite different from Galleria -- essentially you would be on quite different sides of say Stanley Park. We were late for our 3 pm appointment but managed to get the headsets on and head into the galleria for 1.5 hours of the two you usually get of wandering through amazing statuary like Bernini's Appollo and Daphne, or the statue of the pale Pauline upon her divan -- she was Napoleon's sister who married a very wealthy Borghese, a connection that saw many of the Italian family's art treasures purchased at great cost to Italy and to the family Borghese moved to Paris, or so we were told. Perhaps the most interesting pieces were the Carravaggios and the Titians in the upstairs collection.

This amazing art gallery experience was included in the options for our Roma Pass ... we have agreed that this pass was an excellent purchase, particularly as it was fully paid for with simply the Colosseo and the Borghese but it also covered all our on/off public transit needs and enabled us to move easily, albeit with significant planning often under Chris's excellent tutelage. We are a truly interdependent group.

We finally resorted to a taxi to take us home, at 3 euros each. Now three pairs of legs are showing signs of the stress of walking -- we did 8 kms on the tour above -- and we hadn't had time to eat as the A&D Tour turned out to be over 5 hours! We loved our cabby who, on finding out we were from Vancouver, began to tell us all the wonderful things he had heard about our town.

I am up earlier than my roomies ... but had collapsed the minute we got home and am convinced it will take everything I've got to stuff all my belongings -- new art, pamphlets, jewellery, etc. -- into the bags before Orlando comes to take us to the train for Florence. And I truly want to sneak around the corner fto the small piazza where I can linger for a caffe latte, an experience which neither Joanne nor Chris appreciate, being tea drinkers! By 6 pm this evening, we will have added Jan and Frances, met Beppe -- our new driver -- and had a few hours to wander the streets of Florence as we wait for their later arrival. I will miss Rome, but the cabby told us that living there for any length of time would expose us pretty quickly to the problems of taxes, government, etc. .... we didn't tell him that he would find things the same and I am reading headlines that suggest our "government" is again delivering more bad economic news in BC -- was it billions I was reading about? One needs holidays to escape these realities.

My roomies will be blogging soon. There is really so very little time! I'm off to pack or I'll have no sneaking out for coffee time!

Moira