We're home

We're back to normal. Pat's working, I've unpacked all those bags, we're seeing friends and settling back in during a huge New York heatwave. But before I forget, here's a brief update on our last week in Rome.

Thursday we vegged at home until Pat went to class. I went for a big walk around Trastevere and saw St. Cecelia and St. Agatha churches and did some window shopping.



I met Pat and some classmates to pick up pizza and go over to Martin's place. Cool apartment somehow housed in the top floor of a school. Lots of pizza, wine and hanging out.

Friday Pat and I met Amanda, Martin and his friend from home at the Palazzo Barberini. Gorgeous gallery, stupid no-photo policy. Here's a shot from outside instead.



After lunch at L'insalata Ricca we disbanded and Pat and I went home. After class, Amanda joined us for a bottle of prosecco at al Grammelot - the local wine bar we went to often during the summer.

Saturday was the last class trip. We had to get to the station really early but made it
on time. We took a train and bus to a really quaint little town. After watching a cowboy bring his horse to water in the piazza fountain and being turned away by the local police. we took a steep walk up to the tiny Horace museum and look out over the valley below.



We went to the ruins of Horace's villa, then up to a little waterfall he mentions in his writings. We had a nice relaxing picnic in front of the waterfall.



Pat made a really sweet toast to Reginaldus and we actually got a photo together with him.



After that, we took the train home, saying goodbye to Reggie one last time (typically, he pulled me in for a hug then pushed me away saying "Get going now"). We came home and John and Leah came over to pick up their stuff they'd stored with us while on their roadtrip honeymoon. We brought them with us for a nice dinner with our friends at Scarpone (ironically where they had their wedding. Such a nice night out - here's me with Juliet and Amanda.



Sunday Pat and I had our last day in Rome so we became super-tourists again. Saw St. Clemente, St. Maria sopra Minerva, the Pantheon, St Peter in Chains. And even went to the Trevi fountain again, cheesily throwing coins in to assure our return.



Exhausted, we met our friends up at the Paola Fountain on the Janiculum for a goodbye picnic.




Monday we join Joe, Juliet and their friend from home and Tim for a trip to the sea. We went to Sperlonga - bus, train, bus, beach! Gorgeous town, clear water, soft sand.




We hiked up the stairs of the cliffside town.



Lovely, but prciey, so back down again for lunch where Martin (ditching the less-than-fun friend) met us.



After another trip down to swim, we went home and packed.

Tuesday our power was out again (4 times this summer) and the broker forgot our security deposit check, but we couldn't care less. We took these as signs it was time to go back to NYC. After the landlord and broker left, we took a cab to the station, train to the airport only to see our flight was delayed 3 hours. They gave us meal vouchers - which we tried to cash in lots of crappy places only to find the cafeteria that took them. Um, that's a hella lot of food for free - thanks Eurofly! We added up our meals from the menu - 47 euros all told. Crazy.



Lots of waiting in the airport - luckily it's stocked with Versace stores and duty-free shops where we loaded up on cheap liquor. And we had plenty of books in carry-on.



We eventually boarded (taking 7 Italian employees to do the job of one ticket checker) and had an eventful flight - watched "In the land of Women" and "Quess Who" and became addicted to video backgammon. Steph met us at the airport and since it was too late for dinner, we just stopped off at Pat's folks' house for a little bit to pick up the car and give them their gifts.

Yesterday morning we went grocery shopping. Then I unpacked and went through all our mail (2 months = a ridiculous amount of mail!) while Pat was at work. We met Pat's folks for dinner. Mexican! So great to eat non-Italian food.

Today I went swimming in our pool for the first time. It's so hot here and the water was fabulous. Now I'm off to do a little shopping before meeting Pat and Pete for dinner. Chinese! Woo!

Homeward bound

We're about to go to the airport and fly home. I'll do a big last-week-in-Rome post once we're back in NYC.

But here's a photo of Sperlonga - a wonderful place to spend our last full day in Italy yesterday.

Latin Soul King

Latin Soul King, originally uploaded by pbartleby.

This bit of graffiti is on the wall right outside the front gate of our school. Rumor has it that it's about Reginaldus himself.

Thursday - paintings, a pinecone and a party

Monday night, post-laundry, Pat brought home Amanda and we had gnocchi for dinner at home. A nice relaxing night in for once.

Tuesday we slept in then went to the Vatican museums around 1PM. This is the perfect time to go - the line took less than 15 minutes to get in, moving the whole time.



The museum itself is really interesting in design. When you enter, it feels like an airport - security, ticket booths that resemble customs booths, escalators.



But then on the main floor you can start to see how beautiful it really is. Pat persuaded me to go to the less crowded wing with the Classical Antiquities and Pinacoteca first. So amazing - cool Christian sarcophagi blatantly copying the earlier Roman style. And the paintings of Fra Angelico, Raphael, Caravaggio, di Vinci were breathtaking.



Bolstered by the calm of the relatively empty wing, we walked across the courtyard toward the main event. Loved the courtyard - full of huge sculptures including a giant pinecone.



There were also photos of the Michaelangelo's and Raphael's ahead. I'm not sure why - is it in case it's so crowded you can't see them?

We entered the second wing and first we saw huge halls full of Roman statues, the Egyptian collection, animal sculptures, the inner courtyard with the Laocoon sculpture, gorgeous mosaic floors.




Then we entered the fray - huge groups of tourists on the hunt for the biggest checklist check in all of Rome, the Sistine Chapel.



They really send you on a serpentine route. Past the modern collection (mostly OK paintings by faithful artists, with a couple good Dali's and a Ben Shaun mixed in), hustled through the Raphael Stanze, on to the Chapel. Since the Vatican now has a deal with some Japanese company giving them full rights to photograph the chapel, there are supposed to be no photos but lots of people were still snapping away.

The Chapel itself is beautiful - I hadn't seen it since 1999, soon after its restoration. I remember how shockingly bright the colors seemed compared to the photos in books pre-restoration. But even after only 8 years, the colors have faded a bit again. The paintings on the ceiling are just wonderful. Despite the guards pleas of "Silenzio" it was really loud since every sound was reflected off the walls. We finally sat along the back wall and took it all in.

After the Sistine Chapel, the Borgia apartments were nice, but we were museumed out. They did have some cool maps of what navigators once thought the world looked like. We took the circular staircase down and outside just as the museums were closing around 4:30.



After we left the museums, we were hungry and tired. Luckily we spotted Old Bridge gelateria - possibly the best gelato of the trip. I had creme brulee, amaretto and fragola. Pat had a coffee frappe. Still hungry but not interested in the tourist menus at the restaurants nearby, we found a sandwich shop with NYC style options, like hot sauce. I cannot tell you how good spicy food tastes after months of very little heat.

We wound our way back towards St. Peter's and took the bus home. Pat went to his last class then called me up and I met him and some friends for sandwiches at the kebab place. We hung out in the piazza late drinking white wine together. Afterwards, Pat and I had more gelato (bacio and vanilla for me) on the walk home, bringing our day's total of sandwiches to 3 and gelato to 2 each. I tell you, it's a good thing we walk all the time!

Yesterday we shopped for food for our last Greek club party. My menu: prosciutto con melone, Greek salad, bread, homemade tsitsiki, pastitsio (one vegetarian, one meat), grilled shrimp, Greek-diner lemon potatoes, red wine and grilled plums for dessert.

We went to the fruit/veggie market first, then the supermarket and about 4 butchers before giving up on the strangely absent-from-Rome lamb and buying beef to be ground instead.



We went back to the outdoor market and made the fishmonger's day by buying over a kilo of his sweet shrimp. Pat had been documenting the whole day, taking a photo every 15 minutes. So you can see our everyday life in excruciating detail. Ha!

I started cooking and cleaning once Pat went to class. Luckily I started with the potatoes as they unexpectedly needed to marinate in the lemon, oil and broth for 2 hours. I quickly moved on to the pastitsios, making the red sauce in 2 pans, one with meat, one with just eggplant. Thank God the bechamel was vegetarian and I only had to make one - I was running out of pots in our ill-equipped kitchen. I boiled the penne and assembled the pastitsio's in the only pans we had that would fit them (an oversized frying pan for one, another in a soup pot) and finally baked the potatoes. While those were cooking, I made the tsisiki, chopped veggies for the salad, vacuumed and straightened up, took in the laundry from the yard and actually found a minute to shower.

Right before Pat and the rest of Greek club arrived, I sliced up the melon (saving some for the vegetarians) and dressed it with the prosciutto. One girl helped me slice the bread and assemble the shrimp kebobs while everyone else carried out the chairs and plates to the backyard.

Eating starters and wine, they read a paragraph of Greek. Break for dinner. And finally, once they'd read the death of Alexander (and I'd finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics, that freaky, creepy, fun book), we had dessert.

After dinner, we soon headed inside and some people left. The rest of us hung out chatting until pretty late. Now today we're being lazy and cleaning up after the party. I think we might head up to the Janiculum park and read outside for a while before Pat's class.

Our broker called this morning and made our exit appointment for next Tuesday. She and the landlord will come here to check out the place and pick up our keys. I can't believe how soon this is happening! Tonight we're going over to a friend's place for dinner, the last class trip is Saturday and there's possibly a beach trip Monday. But things are winding down; already many people have left and it really feels like the end.

A Day in Rome, 12:15

A Day in Rome, 12:15, originally uploaded by pbartleby.

Yesterday Pat documented his day in 15 minute increments. Now you can see our normal Roman lives - not every day is a trip to the Vatican or the mountains.

Map of New York

Vatican Museums, originally uploaded by pbartleby.

In the Borgia Apartments at the Vatican Museums is this amazing map depicting a Europe crowded with detail and information and another giant continent to the left with almost nothing but a list of city names along the coast. I'm standing more or less in front of New York, although I couldn't pick out a name. This could be because the writing was tiny, the writing was upside-down (in fact, the whole map, at least from a navigator's perspective, appears to have been upside-down), or because I have no idea what the old Latin name for New York might have been.

Monday - friends, flea markets, films & fish

Remember what I wrote about Saturday needing to be an early night? Um, no. I met Pat and friends up at his class and we picked up pizzas at Al Pau and wine to bring over to Joe & Juliet's place. We ended up hanging out on their deck for hours, then moving inside for Pat and Joe to play guitar.





So much fun but we didn't leave until after 4AM.

Sunday morning came early but we still walked down the hill for the Porta Porteuse flea market a little after 10. After going to another giant flea market (we assumed they were connected) which looked like everyone had just emptied their junk drawers onto tables, we found the Porta Porteuse. This thing was HUGE. No idea how many stands, stretched out over several blocks along the river. Look at Pat's horrified reaction:



We ran into our friends from the night before (nice to see we weren't the only slackers who missed the 6AM opening) and did lots of souvenir shopping.

After we'd exhausted our feet and wallets, we all took the bus for lunch and a movie. We ended up eating in an Irish pub (delicious fries, scary-looking pizza) then gorging on pick-a-mix candy that our lovely Roman concession dude gave us girls at a reduced rate. The theater was a tad warm though since we'd been craving A/C during the heat of the flea market. We saw Harry Potter in English - much darker than the early movies, but in a good way.

After, we parted ways and Pat and I relaxed at home a bit before heading back into Trastevere for sushi dinner at Take. Yummy sushi, including some things we hadn't seen before like raw scallops and seared salmon. Annoying American students nearby meant we looked great by comparison and we got our orders before them and with a smile.

Today was laundry day and therefore a day of relaxing at home. Pat was working all morning on the computer, so I read and tanned between loads. I've read so many books this summer, the current being Calamity Physics. So far it's pretty gripping.

We come back a week from tomorrow and I'm getting more and more excited. Tomorrow we're going to the Vatican museums and after that I don't feel like there's any one thing we still need to see. I'm sure we'll continue walking around every day and going out at night, but I'm realizing this is our first trip to Rome together. Whether we come back as visitors or to live here again, we don't need to fit every church, museum and landmark in right now.