Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Although the rest of our tour group arrived at various times this morning, we were on our own until lunch. We toured a number of churches and wandered the streets some more.

Our first stop was was a church (Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri) which is the entrance to the Baths of Diocletian which were built between the years 298 AD and 306 AD. The dome was designed by Michelangelo and, as you would expect, the art work was spectacular. And we saw a bit of the Meridian Line that you may remember from the Dan Brown book (The Da Vinci Code). There was a lovely garden passage out back with a huge statue of Galileo.

From there we toured a few more churches and some of the outer portions of the baths (the free stuff). Every church was an art gallery unto itself, and in the Santa Maria della Vittoria we saw the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (a sculpture by Bernini).

We met our tour group for lunch but then had most of the afternoon free. We did some more wandering and ended up at the Piazza Vittorio which is a public park and seemed to be well used by the locals. These are the remains of an ancient fountain.

We headed out to visit another church but were sidetracked by a sidewalk cafe where we stopped to enjoy the view and have a coffee.

We met our group back at the hotel late in the afternoon for a guided tour of the Palazzo Massimo, one of the buildings of the National Museum of Rome. Our tour guide was wonderful and although we could have spent hours looking we had only one hour and had to trust that we were seeing the highlights.

After the tour we were back to the hotel and our classroom for some helpful tour hints. Then we were off to a welcome reception on the rooftop of the hotel.

Dinner was at a restaurant a few blocks away and was awesome. I have taken quite a liking to lemon. I had a lemon sauce with dinner last night, plus our taste of lemon liqueur. Tonight’s dessert was a cream puff filled and topped with a lemon custard.

Remember I mentioned dinner last night wasn’t that great? We noticed today that our dinner a few days from now will be in that same place. I wonder if the food will be better now that we know the restaurant is part of those ancient baths we saw earlier today.