Ah, to be a tourist!

It amazes me that after about a month total in Rome (including my vacation
last year) that I could still fill an afternoon seeing things I hadn't
seen before. Mainly I went church-hopping. My first one was Santa Maria
Maggiore, which is just up the street from my hostel. I checked out its
Sistine Chapel (the one that Michaelangelo painted was built by pope
Sixtus V, this is where he's buried) and the tomb of Bernini. It took me
three tries of walking outside and looking at the map before I was able to
find Bernini's grave site - I expected more of a monument to the greatest
artist in Italian history (and the only one with the chops to put down
Michaelangelo) than some writing on the floor. But no, all the
interesting grave monuments belonged to popes, not some schmuck artist. I
had the amusement of seeing the sacred atmosphere of silence broken by the
cell phone of a visiting monk, though in his defense the ring tone was an
organ hymn.

From there I wandered over to San Giovanni Laterno, the home church of the
pope (the Vatican is just where they've lived for the past five hundred
years, S. Giovanni is the seat of the actual bishopric of Rome). Aside
from having burnt down a few times over the millenia, it's pretty much the
way it was when Constantine built it in the 330's (unlike St Peter's,
which was totally torn down and redone in the sixteenth century). A
pretty amazing place, it's a pity that the lovely park next door is now a
campground for vagrants.

And what should be done with the ruins of the Roman Baths of Diocletian?
Turn them into a church! This one was a little odd (Santa Maria degli
Angeli dei Martiri), because the facade is all ancient Roman brick and the
inside is entirely swathed in marble (unlike most other churches where the
marble is on both sides, and the cathedral in Florence where the outside
is marble and the inside brick). The coolest thing about this church for
me was a marble sculpture of the head of John the Baptist that was done in
2006. It was great to see the traditions of beautiful classical sculpting
continue. The dome at the entrance to this church is kind of bizarre,
because it was designed by Michealangelo to look higher than it is. The
decorative panels of the dome are built in forced perspective (so that the
designs near the top are smaller than the ones at the bottom but your eye
is fooled into thinking they're the same size just further away) creating
what the books call something like "the illusion of grandiose height".
For me it just made me dizzy as my eyes and brain had a fight about what
exactly they were looking at.

The rest of the afternoon I just meandered around, and there were two or
three times when I said "hey, I know where I am, I got totally lost here
last week/year!". I wandered through the ghetto (by which I mean the
place where they used to keep the Jews) for a bit and figured out exactly
how to receive packages here (for more CDs when I hopefully run out)
because, of course, there is a Mailboxes Etc and a FedEx on either side of
the Blockbuster video...

Love to you all!
Vince