Sunday
I'd like you all to appreciate how much I love my parents--after more than a week of twelve-plus hour days and about six hours of sleep a night, I was willing to wake up early in order to join them at their hotel for breakfast. Of course, when I tried to remind them of this, they pointed out that they flew to Rome to visit me, and I can't really compete with that :) Anyway, the hotel breakfast was very nice, and I discovered a new favorite--meleverde (green apple) juice. It was delicious, and now I keep trying to find it at the neighborhood grocery stores, because I'm fairly certain I won't be able to find it back home.
They were looking for something to do that wasn't too strenuous, as they were still adjusting to the time difference and I'd sort of run them around a lot of Rome yesterday, so today I took them to the Capitoline museum. Much to my surprise and frustration, the area where you can look out on the Forum was closed, but we enjoyed wandering through the rest of the museums--I was far more capable as a tour guide here than I was yesterday, as I'd actually been to all of these before. Also because I'd been there before, I took pictures of very silly things, so all of the more serious pictures are from Dad.
Here we are in front of the giant foot of Constantine, so now you can actually see how big it is.
Dad wanted this picture—I’m making the gesture that the hand is making, which is either a gesture of benediction or the ad locutio gesture, which is seen in lots of Roman statuary and can mean several different things.
This is the head of one of the snakes from a statue of Herakles as a baby (the myth in a nutshell: Hera sent two snakes to kill the baby Herakles because he was yet another of Zeus' half-divine children. Herakles strangled the snakes, saving himself and his human brother). Doesn't it have a great "WTF" look on its face?
There was a tiny Egyptian room in the museum. I really liked this Horus statue, and apparently Dad snapped this shot while I was admiring it.
And here I am in teacher mode. Mom was kind enough to indulge my need to show off.
Mom admiring the Dying Gaul’s butt. It is a nice butt :P
Dad really liked this little satyr face, which was probably a decorative water spout. It always makes me laugh.
The ceilings of the museum are almost as decorative as the exhibits!
This is the eagle of Jupiter, at the feet of a Ganymede statue (Ganymede was carried off by Jupiter’s eagle to become the cupbearer of the gods). I was sort of taking pictures from a “silly animal faces” theme at this point.
Speaking of silly faces...This is a particularly fine example of a composite capital, with the acanthus leaves of a Corinthian and the scrolled volute of an Ionic.
Here’s Mom and I just hanging out on the steps of the giant room where the Marcus Aurelius statue is. The museum is big and exhausting!
We couldn’t get into the tabularium where the fantastic view from above of the Forum was, but after we left the museum we wandered around outside until we found a high point that still gave us a pretty good view.
I wanted family pictures, but someone had to hold the camera...so we just swapped around and made it three pictures.
We kept following the high path that we’d found, and came to a little garden with a nice view of the rooftops of Rome. Dad stood and looked out over the city while Mom and I took a break, and I thought that this was so perfectly framed that it needed to be an artsy picture.
...yeah, then I got really artsy-fartsy. Look at that sun breaking through the cloud cover though, can you really blame me?
While we were in the little garden, we saw this dog running around with his owner—the collar and the fact that he was happily chasing around after his owner was pretty much the only way we could be sure that this was actually a dog, and not a wolf. It is Rome, after all :)
After we were done with the museum, and had wandered around the top of the Capitoline hill all we wanted, we started looking for dinner. We were fairly close to the Jewish Quarter, and I remembered that our professors had mentioned that you could get the best fried artichokes there, and I love artichokes. Mom and Dad were amenable to the suggestion, and we found a restaurant that was open relatively early (usually Roman restaurants don’t open for dinner until 7:30).
I got my fried artichoke :) It was a bit strange to eat, but it was delicious.
After dinner we began the trying ordeal of attempting to get anywhere on a Sunday evening using public transportation...the bus schedules on the weekend are haphazard at best, and we ended up walking quite a ways before we finally found a bus that could take us the rest of the way home. I fail at weekend transportation, but thankfully they forgave me.
Again, here's Mom's take on the day:
On Sunday we decided to have a leisurely morning and had a later breakfast and figure out what we were going to do for the day. Katie came over to the hotel and joined us. I told her I had been having this green apple juice for breakfast every morning and thought she should try it. It was a hit and one I think she's still enjoying (if she can find it in the stores). Since I was still feeling jet lagged and Katie was still tired after her week in Sicily, we decided to do the Capitoline Museum. It made for a relaxing day of sightseeing. After the museum, we decided to stay in the area for dinner in the Jewish Ghetto. We had a very nice dinner with fried artichokes, artichoke pasta, and one of the best minestrone soups I've had. Getting back was again a challenge....bus schedules on the weekends are dicey at best....especially on a Sunday night.
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