Eternal Rome

hi all, well, first day in rome was a great one; the weather has changed
completely for the better ever since we stepped onto shore at ancona. we had a
beautiful train journey through some picturesque italian countryside with all
shades of soft greens and browns, dappled light on the woodland glades, and tall
hills crested with brick churches and townships. stunning.
we took a while to settle into the hostel — we've actually moved moved from our
supposed location to another hostel just beside termini station. it's fairly
noisy, but has worked out ok. the guy running the hostel is a bit of a cowboy
(he's trying to run about eight hostels all at once!), and i wasn't sure we were
going to have beds for a while, but everything has worked out fine in the end,
and the people who are actually looking after us now are lovely. pizza in the
evening made a fine gourmet experience before we launched into a night tour of
rome, covering the colosseum, the imperial fora, trajan's column, the vittorio
emmanuale monstrosity, thn down the corso to the trevi fountain (always lovely)
and then the spanish steps (seldom lovely — why do people rave about this place
when it's just a hangout for drunks and hooligans?). we got back about 10.30 and
crashed into bed.
this morning we set out to the supermarcato, where the boys are getting better
at feeding themselves properly for a day. it's good to see salads and fruit
being purchased as well as the chips and coke. we then continued on to santa
maria maggiore, one of the four big churches of rome, whose ceiling is lined
with inca gold set to the pope by ferdinand and isabella of spain. the boys were
suitably impressed, and i am amazed at how much i still love seeing all these
sights, even though i seen them before. next were some byzantin mosaics in st
prassede, followed by michelangelo's moses and the chains of st peter in san
pietro in vinculi. we then headed back past the colosseum and fora of augustus
and trajan to see trajan's column properly, before reveling in the over-the-top
mbellishments of the vitorio emmanuale, and the ara caeli, before descending
upon the capitoline museum.
this proved to be, for me, the highlight of the day, as there happened to be an
exhibition of roman busts and statues on at the same time. this means that we
got to see the 'patrician with busts', the famous busts of cicero, pompey the
great, cato and his wife, and many others which we would normally have to go to
strange and exotic countries to get to. on top of this were the splendid
capitoline brutus, she-wolf, spinario, medusa, poly-mammerian artemisian minerva
(the boys are now experts on what this entails) and many others. the bust of
commodus and the equestrian statue of marcus aurelius — preserved only because
the christian popes thought it was constantine the great, not aurelius, who
actually persecuted the christians — as ell as the capitoline venus, the dying
gaul, etc, etc, were all equally as magnificent.
we happily had a brief stop for lunch, drinking from the aqua marcia, an
aquaduct which still brings water into rome two millennia later, and then dashed
past the theatre of marcellus, the ponte fabricio and isola tiberina with its
church and hospital of st bartholemew, then back across the tiber to some
ancient roman temples, and then the old temple which the greeks used for worship
in rome, santa maria di cosmedin. here one of the guides saw ben mcarthur's hand
in it's cast, and joked that he must already have been to see the bocca della
verità (an old sewer cover which has mistakenly been accorded the power of, when
someone puts his hand in, of crushing the hand of a liar while leaving alone the
hand of someone who tells the truth). we than turned the corner to see the
remains of the circus maximus and nero's golden palace.
we then raced off to st john lateran, one of my very favourite churches in rome,
and then topped of the day with a visit to st peter's in the vatican, a truly
wonderful and overawing experience. on that note, it seemed a little pointless
to do anything else — why end the day on an anticlimax? — so we headed back on
the metro to termini, getting in about 7.15, the earliest night we've had so
far.
can't wait for tomorrow!
love to all at home,
— Mr Buckingham