Rome!!

We traveled all day on Tuesday to reach Rome - 1st by car to Bern, then by train to Geneva, then by plane to Rome, then by train to the station near our hotel, & finally on foot for 20 minutes or so to get to our hotel. I feel like Rome was a bit of a whirlwind - we tried to pack a lot into 2 days! Then 3rd day, we had to slow down and take it a little easier - plus pick up the things we hadn't gotten to the 1st 2 days :-).

We started out at the Colosseum - of course!! Our hotel was pretty much just down the street from the Colosseum - so we wandered out the door and kind of stumbled on it :-). It was one of our favorite things, probably b/c we could really visualize the way it was and the sort of things that happened there thanks to the movies :-). It was really amazing to see it in person for sure! You could see the underground rooms where the gladiators and wild animals were held - again, pretty easy to picture it all. One amazing fact is that in 1 day, they killed 5000 wild animals!! Some species were going extinct b/c they took too many for their games. Unreal. Apparently some researchers are questioning whether any Christians were really forced to fight the wild animals there. But it seems likely to me given the intense persecution the Christians faced and the kind of people they forced to "compete". I'm not sure Katie was all that impressed w/ the Colosseum (or the other old things we saw this day...) but here is a sunny shot of her in the Colosseum.

The next stop was the Roman Forum, where the business & life of Ancient Rome was done. Again, the oldness of all this is mind boggling - all close to 2000 years old! Unfortunately the mined a lot of the beautiful stone and marble from these ruins to use elsewhere - so you have to really use your imagination to see what was there. We did get a cool book that had artists drawings of the way they think the buildings looked and you could overlay those on top of pictures of what remains. So that was helpful to understand what we were looking at. Otherwise it looks like a big rock pile at times :-). We ate lunch (that I told you about in yesterday's post) towards the right of the 1st Roman Forum pic - it was very cool. And we managed to overhear some English speaking tour guides explaining the history of the place :-). There were TONS of group tours around - mainly b/c, as I mentioned, it otherwise starts to look like a big rock pile :-). We had guide books so we weren't interested in the formal tours, but we did enjoy benefiting from them occasionally! One amazing thing we noticed is all the "scrap" rocks that are sitting around is some pretty fancy stone - marble and such. But there was so much that now it's just scrap! And I guess they keep it around in case they figure out what famous thing it used to be a part of :-).

The 1st day we also saw the Pantheon - which is pretty cool for us Math nerds - it is a perfect spherical dome on top of a perfect cylinder - if the sphere were complete, it would touch the ground of the inside of the Pantheon. Pretty cool. This isn't a great pic of it... but maybe it gives you the idea. It's actually an open building w/ a hole in the roof where the rain can come in. And then there are holes in the ground where the water can drain out. We enjoyed the mathematical beauty of it :-). And the regular sort of beauty too :-). One of the cool things about the Pantheon is that it is one of the only old buildings in Rome that was not looted for its beautiful stones - i.e. it is mostly as it was when it was built. (in 27 B.C.!!)

We also enjoyed the fountains around Rome - there are water fountains everywhere, where you can fill up your water bottles for free. Or you can block the bottom spout and the water comes out a small hole to make a drinking fountain. It is a great idea! Katie enjoyed playing in them, especially in St Peter's Square. (the 2nd fountain pic)



The 2nd day, on Thursday, we went to St Peter's Square and Basilica in the Vatican. It was built right next to the spot where Peter was said to be crucified. I don't really know what to write about St Peter's Basilica. I was moved to tears twice while visiting it, though for different reasons. First b/c it is truly beautiful and grand on an unimaginable scale. I looked and looked for a postcard of the inside w/o success - it's possible that they don't allow postcards to be sold of the interior, but more likely it's just too amazing for a photo to do it justice. But then as I went into the church further, I saw the place where the line of people were passing by to kiss the feet of a statue of St Peter. And it just made me very sad to wonder what I do in the name of faith that is actually taking the place of just worshiping God Himself.

After the basilica, we went to the Vatican Museum. This is a massive complex of a series of museums, all full of collections of amazing art work, and it most memorably includes the Sistine Chapel. We did the high level tour. :-) The Sistine Chapel was really cool - very hard to take it all in due to the number of people inside and the volume of artwork covering the ceiling and walls of the chapel. The ceiling is what Michaelangelo painted and it is various scenes from the book of Genesis. Most famously, it includes the creation of Adam where God is reaching out His hand to touch Adam and give him life. It was amazing to see. Unfortunately, you couldn't take pics of the chapel. After eating lunch in a courtyard of the museum and eavesdropping on more tour groups, we saw the museum that has the biggest collection of statuary. And then we went back to the hotel and collapsed :-).

Day 3 in Rome we started off slow with an Italian breakfast of delicious (and pretty!) coffee and pastries. Then we wandered around at a much slower pace to see a couple of churches we had missed the previous 2 days - primarily to see the Michaelangelo statues in them. (we saw the San Pietro in Vincoli - St Peter in Chains - where they have Michaelangelo's statue of Moses and the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva where they have a Michaelangelo statue of Jesus. We also had missed the Trevi Fountain on the previous days. I think this was one of Katie's favorite things. She loves fountains and just came up with some really cute poses there :-). The Trevi Fountain was in a famous movie from the 50s. If you throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain (over your shoulder), you are supposely guaranteeing that you will return to Rome someday. We'll see :-), but it was fun to watch Katie try to throw a coin over her shoulder :-). It was actually hard to pick which pics to post, b/c she was having such a good time and looking so cute! :-)







The other thing we did on Friday was to reconnect with some friends from Texas who moved to Rome almost a year ago to be missionaries. Kip & Tammy have 4 kids, including a daughter, Lily, who just turned 5 last month. She & Katie really hit it off! Lily's big brothers go to a school that is just behind the Pantheon (can you imagine?!?!) and it was their last day of school, so we met them there to say hello. It was really kind of a party, with streamers and confetti all over the place! We really enjoyed the opportunity to see a slice of normal Italian life! So then we went to their house Friday night to share pizza with them - and LOTS of giggles! It was nice b/c Lily understands what Katie is experiencing in a very unique way so I think they especially appreciated being together. The 2nd pic is the girls reliving the fun of confetti :-).

This pretty much describes how we felt when we got home :-). Katie zonked out in the plane as we landed in Madrid on Saturday and really did not want to wake up!! And this pretty much describes how I've felt much of the rest of this week :-). But we sure did have a good time! The world keeps getting smaller - and our minds keep getting blown away by the things we are experiencing!