TinyD continues his world travels in Rome, Italy.
Day 1 he went to the Roman Forum and Trevi Fountain, with a few other monuments and fountains thrown in.
Day 2 included a visit to the Colosseum, which was very impressive, more Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill and Farnesi Gardens, the Church of San Clemente and the cathedral of St. John Lateran.
The church of San Clemente was particularly interesting as it has a ‘new’ church from the 12th century, built on top of an older church from the 4th century, and a Roman Mithraeum (one of the Roman religions) from the 1st century. They also had part of St. Cyril entombed there, who invented the Cyrillic alphabet (ie Russian alphabet), was also located there. He’s always depicted with an anchor, as he was thrown into the Black Sea, wearing an anchor, to calm a stormy sea. Not sure it worked, but it did gain him sainthood. Somehow, they found him a few hundred years later in the black sea (still tied to an anchor) and he’s been at the Church of San Clemente ever since.
Day 3 is today. TinyD went to the Vatican Museum including the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museum has a lot of art and every single surface is decorated. Lots of gold paint. We also went to St. Peter’s basilica, the largest Catholic church in the world. It has markers inside on the floor showing the sizes of the next 15 largest churches, which are significantly smaller. We also saw the crypt where all the popes are entombed and walked down the street to the Castell Sant’Angelo. For those of you familiar with the Da Vinci Code, that’s where the bad guy was hanging out.
Travis has found a way to map our touristiness using Google Earth and a running website. So you can see exactly where we walked, including the wrong turns where we got lost trying to find the Rome Metro. The website for our travels is : http://www.mapmyrun.com/user_routes.php?username=rtd26md
What the map doesn’t show is all the bathrooms we stopped at (ok, I stopped at) during our Roma travels. As TinyD grows, there seems to be less room for other mommy organs, like, oh, my bladder. Tally 4 WC visits while at the Vatican, plus 1 more later in the afternoon. I’ve been to every bathroom in the Roman Forum and Colosseum and have visited the loo at every restaurant and café we’ve been to. More on this topic later.