Roma for Springa Breaka

Yes, we have such a hard life - $40 tickets and a few hours to Rome - please don't feel too sorry for us :)

The Vatican Museum - enormous and fabulous amount of art all the way to the Sistine Chapel - which was also amazing, but a bit ruined by the police saying "SHHHH! NO PHOTO!" every few minutes! Must be related

The Pantheon - once a Roman temple, now a church

The forum - center of life in ancient Rome - below street level

The colossal colloseum

(I really did have this all in paragraphs - sorry about the format now!)

Walking through Rome is, as my friend Leslie describes it, like walking through a huge outdoor museum. Every corner and every building seems to tell a story of its own. Buildings that make you gasp in amazement are not even marked on the map because there are simply too many to note. Even relatively ordinary places held a mystery because you knew that there still lies an entire city - mostly unexplored - underneath your feet. One person we met told us that every time the city has to dig for pipes, subways, or anything - they run into a ruin. Standing outside the coliseum it was hard to fathom what went on inside. In the first three months of its inauguration, twenty-thousand people (mostly Christians) & thousands of animals were killed for entertainment. Middle Atlas Barbary lions are extinct today mostly because of the Roman’s lust for watching lions kill and be killed. But all the persecution of Christians did not make them extinct - in fact, as is so often the case in Europe, you are faced with irony. . . The city which desired to annihilate Christianity ended up being the base of the Catholic Church. Dripping in gold, paint, marble and decorations, each site was truly fabulous And yet a verse kept running through my mind, “Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow . . . yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are.” It struck me that no matter how hard humans try to create beauty, for this nature-loving girl, anyway, it just doesn’t compare with the beauty in a simple flower. But even with my cynicism of cities, of manmade beauty and of where exactly all the money used to build these buildings came from, it struck me that the church kept art alive for centuries. And it encouraged God-given talent and pushed artists to new and astounding heights (literally) of art. Almost every cathedral we entered was covered in enormous paintings from floor to ceiling. And I had several “magical moments” in Rome. Walking into a church where almost every single person had their faces lifted upward to a majestic painting that covered the soaring ceiling - lighting candles symbolic of our prayers then kneeling down beside our girls’ little reverent, earnest selves to pray - standing on a hill overlooking the city where the roofs of the many basilicas/churches gleamed in the sunlight as the bells tolled while a guitarist played “Adeste fideles” - soaking in the strains of the organ mixed with the chants of the monks and mingling with incense of their prayers in St. Peter’s Basilica, entering into a plaza filled with fountains, paintings,and a woman singing “Ave Maria” - Walking through a phenomenal path of art galleries in the Vatican museum . . . Come to think of it, every one of these moments had to do with awed reverent silence or music. On a lighter note - I’m sure you are wondering how the pizza and pasta was. Well, it truly was everywhere. And it was simple - not laden with the all the spices and toppings that we Americans love so dearly. The pizza crusts were always homemade and thin. And we loved hearing Italian. It’s such a beautiful language that Gerald and I even enjoyed a temper tantrum thrown by a child on the bus - “Mama . . ." and on he went in his adorable, sing-songy, vowels-at-the-end-of-every-word language. We smiled at him, knowing that if our children threw tantrums in Italian, we would give them whatever they wanted.