Destination: Rome

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August 28, 2021-September 3, 2021

This series contains multiple posts:

  1. Destination: Rome
  2. The National Roman Museum
  3. The Major Basilicas of Rome
  4. The Appian Way and the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus
  5. The Colosseum: an ampitheatre, a church, a fortress, an exotic garden…
  6. The Palaces of Palatine Hill
  7. The Roman Forum benefits from an active imagination
  8. A tale of two tumuli: Castel Sant’Angelo and the Mausoleum of Augustus
  9. The Vatican Museums: the Sacred and the Profane
  10. The National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia
  11. Roman Miscellany and Missed Opportunities

With just three months remaining to our year in France and a dwindling supply of leave days from my post at Pasteur, Natasha and I prioritized a trip to the Eternal City. It was a hard decision; if you could spend a week anywhere in Europe and you already lived in Paris, where would you go? I still hope that some day I will spend enough time in London to understand it at least a little bit– my longest stay there has been eight hours!

The Roman Republic was long, long ago! Why am I showing all the dates as 1000 years later than they should be? Because I couldn’t discern how to make Excel plot negative years (BCE)! Just think of “1000” as the switch from BCE to CE.

There’s no question that Rome has essentially everything one could ask for in a city: history, art, monumentality, and even peaceful greenspaces. Rome’s ancient past was a big draw for both Natasha and me; I was particularly interested in learning what physical remains of Republican Rome (509 – 27 BCE) could still be seen or even touched. For her part, Natasha wanted to feel her own feet on the Appian Way, an ancient thoroughfare lined with monuments, parts of which date to 312 BCE. Having learned a bit of Catholic Church history and architecture since my 1994 trip to the Vatican, I hoped to venture beyond St. Peter’s Basilica.

From Paris, Rome is just a direct flight away, just a little further than from Cape Town to Bloemfontein.

Our short visit to Northern Germany had made us realize how much the Schengen visa has altered travel among countries in Europe. When we arrived in Italy, as when we arrived in Germany, there were no immigration lines and no customs; it still didn’t seem possible that we’d left one nation and entered another! We were unhappy to see that the best flight prices made two unpleasant requirements; we would have to arrive and depart at times too early or too late for easy airport transits, and we would be allowed zero checked bags without a markup of fifty euros. We grimaced and selected flights that would arrive in Rome at 23:05 on a Friday evening and that departed the city at 06:25 on a Saturday morning, a week later. Happily, we were able to preschedule a van to convey us and our bags for both trips to the airport in Rome.

This view from the Castel Sant’Angelo toward the Pantheon and Vittorio Emanuele II Monument encompasses much of the former Campus Martius.

Natasha found a lovely street-level lodging for us through AirBnB. We were located within a block of Piazza Margana, in an area once known as the Campus Martius (which means the same as the “Champs de Mars” in Paris), a salient northwest of the ancient Forum surrounded by a curve in the river Tiber. It had ideal access by foot or bus to all the tourist areas we could hope to see. As a much older building repurposed to a hotel, our flat had some oddities. I might start with the centrally located shower stall surrounded by glass walls. It lacked only a disco ball and light system to make the bather feel more on display! The most unhelpful part was that the street entrance had a foot-and-a-half drop down to the floor of the apartment. We certainly didn’t want to rush through that door when coming home! That said, the apartment stayed cool even on the hottest days, and the vaulted ceiling was a distinctive feature retained from the building’s past.

I hope you will enjoy our wanders through the city!