Rome: Day 3
I awoke today to a bag of fresh croissants hanging on my door, and I would have it no other way. Marco is not aware that my mother cannot have gluten, so he is bringing me more croissants than is humanly possible for one person to eat. It’s the best.
I think it took me until today to realize how amazing Rome is, and I don’t exactly know why. I think I was preoccupied with the impending fear of being beaten, mugged, and left for dead, but I’m over that now. Rome is just more interesting than any place I’ve ever been. It has the most interesting streets I’ve ever seen that are a bit haphazard and run every which way – but in a good way – making it infinitely explorable. Everywhere you turn there’s a new side-street to explore with the most beautiful hidden little church or piazza you’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ve seen any residential-only streets, either. Our block alone has two restaurants, a bar, and two different places to buy gelato. It’s the perfect dense, walkable, mixed-use, interesting urban area, yet it’s so nonchalant about it like it’s not even trying. It just seems like the natural result of a couple thousand years of being a city.
But alas, yesterday was our last day in Rome, so we needed to hit up the remaining historic highlights, like the basilica on our street, Rome’s oldest ruins, and the Pantheon. Basilicas are everywhere, and it’s insane to me that you can just live two minutes away from one and attend mass there all the time.
This is what they make you wear when you try to enter a basilica dressed like a cheap harlot. This also illustrates one of my greatest frustrations with Italy: it is so, so hot, making me want to wear as little as possible; but it is also so, so Catholic, requiring me to cover my shoulders and knees.
Next, we visited Rome’s oldest ruins in the center of the city. Rome has a lot of ruins, but these are the only ones that were turned into an URBAN CAT SANCTUARY. Yes, that’s right, they let the cats frolic amongst the ruins, feed them, and provide them a safe place to sleep at night until they are adopted. Bravo, Rome. Bravo. The only things missing are an attached cat café and a cat themed bookstore.
Lastly, we visited the Pantheon with that famous, ancient, world’s largest unreinforced dome. The outside looks what I imagine to be somewhat comparable to how it looked in the 100s, but on the inside, in typical Rome fashion, they Baroque-ed the crap out of it and turned it into a basilica.
After a morning of exploring, I reluctantly wrenched myself away from the city and headed out to the beach to hangout by Mediterranean. My mom really wanted to do this, and I thought it would be a huge waste of time but it was actually wonderful. Rome’s beaches – like everything else – are much nicer than the crappier U.S. versions. They’re clean and are lined with beach chairs with visors to cover your face from the blaring sun. Perfection.
I also discovered something exciting about my water bottle: it’s the exact perfect size to hold one bottle of wine! So naturally, I decided that the best course of action was to fill it on up with a bottle of white and bring it with me to the beach. How perfect! I thought. Now the wine is easily accessible in a screw-top bottle and will stay cold from the insulated exterior. However, this was not the best course of action, and I advise all readers not to follow my example. The wine leaked all over me during the one-hour ride on three different trains so that by the time I got to the beach, I smelled like a wine bar. Another downside is that it’s impossible to tell how much wine you’re drinking when it’s in an opaque water bottle and not a nice clear wine glass. Please learn from my mistakes.
Now, I am not by any means ready to leave Rome, although I am currently on a high-speed train catapulting across the Italian countryside to Florence. The train is going 244 km/hour, and my ears are popping like nobody’s business. I am skeptical that Florence is not going to live up to Rome. Will the museums be as breathtaking? Are there any basilicas? Do they have croissants au marmalade??? We’ll see.