today has been a FULL day and its not even over yet! i got up kind of early and went across ponte sisto [ed. note: the sisto bridge] to paint a little. i painted a view of the river and the next ponte over, with a church and the trees. i was proud of myself, especially when some of the graphics students asked where i bought the tile… 🙂 haha. anyway, then we got breakfast and met with our tour guides, tom and carlo. we walked first along the tiber to the jewish quarter (the ghetto) that led us right into trajan’s forum, and from there we went into THE roman forum (foro romano, i think). that was pretty cool…. seeing for real the architecture that sergio showed us in his class – the stuff i really liked! the column bases (and really all the architecture in general) are huge – at least as tall as me!
the weather is kind of crummy – rainy off and on – make up your mind! oh, haha, in trajan’s forum, i saw something (or maybe anna saw it) but whatever it was, i said “it reminds me of kansas” and WHY i said that, i don’t remember but it was funny at the time… actually, i’ve said something about the wizard of oz and kansas a LOT lately… even this afternoon on the roof – it was really windy and liz said “auntie em auntie em!” and one of the graphics girls said “we’re not in kansas anymore”
anyway… the foro romano is really cool and i wish it hadn’t been pouring so i could sit and sketch so i could watercolor it :(. from there we walked to the “newer” trajan’s palace and the column of trajan, the pantheon, piazza navona and a few other places. everything here is so cool and i wish the tour hadn’t been so on the go… we practically ran through piazza di trevi and the pantheon! i’d have preferred some time to wander and kind of do our own thing. we did, however, get the afternoon to ourselves, and so anna, libby, sam, bill, emily, rob, erin and i set off for cappella sistina and musei vaticano.
pretty cool… there ere so many piccola cappelli (small chapels) before sistina and some pretty interesting artwork (modern). we wandered through the borgia apartments, which raphael frescoed, and the cappella urbino, among others. THE chapel though is FANTASTICO. i am soooo glad i went. apparently, you can’t take pictures in there, but everyone (ok, only us) took some and we got some good ones. one tattletale though…. rob took one and some woman from another tour tapped in on the shoulder and said loudly “no photos!” and of course the guard was there instantly! oh well… we’d been joking that we would have a good story had we been kicked out of the sistine chapel.
the rest of my night was fairly interesting too! i went to dinner with {ten people} in trastevere; we also checked out the tempieto san pietro over there, but it was closed – all we saw was one side (can’t imagine it looks too different on the other side though!). we ate at this cute restaurant in trastevere – no one spoke english but we figured out what we wanted and ordered it and it was sooo good! really fun time – i am determined to make this trip better than nyc [ed. note: i went on a class field trip to nyc the fall before the italy trip and i spent a majority of the time alone/not with my classmates]. haha… anyway, after that, sam, rob, bill, emily and i walked up into the foro romano and to the colosseum… then to the trevi fountain. sam, bill and emily headed back to the hotel and rob and i headed to the spanish steps (piazza di spagnia) – which was awesome! we walked up this little curving staircase alley and came out on top of the steps, which we proceeded to walk down, then down the axis to piazza del popolo. that must have been around 2am and after that we walked down to the hotel. we found this cute park on top of some old fountain – must have been make out point though so we left pretty quickly, but you could see san pietro so well! one the way back, we wandered into the mausoleum of augustus – there was a construction site there though, so we ended up walking back along the tiber … past cast’l sant’angelo, san pietro, etc and back to ponte sisto.