Rome Highlights

View from our Apartment (Dome of St. Peter's Basilica)

What a wonderful vacation.  Italy was fabulous.  We ate.  We walked.  We saw lots of new things.  Kent did great (in spite of some pretty phenomenal tantrums at historically awe inspiring locales).  I never suspected a six year old could be that keen on the audio guides at a museum.  :) It was the first vacation we have had as a family that felt like the perfect balance of compromise.  Brad and I didn't feel we would have had an entirely different vacation sans child, and Kent seemed to have a good time.  Except when he wasn't having a good time.  All, in all, it was a great success.  Of course we were all ready to come back home, get settled back in, and have some personal space again.

We took in the major sites in Rome:  

The Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel

View of Rome from the Vatican Museum

Practice Sculpture

Map Fresco

Illegal Photo of the Sistine Chapel

St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter's Square

Collosseum

The Forum

 

Capitol Hill

The Pope is in this helicopter!  He was flying to his retirement vacation!

The Spanish Steps & Trevi Fountain

The Pantheon

Dome of the Pantheon.  Open.  Holes in the floor below to drain rain water.

Villa Borghese and Park

This is the Villa Borghese Gallery.  Originally it was home to the nephew of a pope.  Many commissioned sculptures and paintings were displayed here- and still are in their original placement.  No photos are allowed inside.  Via the interwebs I am posting pictures of our favorite three sculptures.

The Rape of Proserpina- 1621-1622

While the content of this sculpture may be rated R the amazing sculpting of texture is amazing.  Look at how his fingers on her thigh look like they depressing the skin.  That is stone!!!!  Amazing!

David prepares his sling shot to defeat Goliath.  The action in this is fabulous.  Kent spent a lot of time looking at this one.

Apollo and Daphne- This is actually meant to be viewed from behind Apollo's foot.  He is chasing Daphne. As he catches her arm, she calls out to her father and begins to turn into a tree- leaves and bark and all.  We just walked around this in circles for a long time!

We enjoyed capturing the cultural essence of the environs:

We took a four hour trip to Pompeii and spent 5 hours walking through the stone streets of the ancient city buried by the ash of Mount Vesuvius and uncovered in the late 1600s.

Oh, and food!  We ate lots of food!  Good food!  Delicious food!

And we drank many a cappuccino!  For about $1.40 per cup it was a great deal for a wonderful beverage.  

We even went to the church crypt of the Capuchin friars for whom the beverage is named after (their brown cloaks and white collars!).  The crypt was very strange as it is decorated with the bones of over 4,000 dead friars.  Creepy and weird!  No pictures allowed inside though.