Today I again started with a quick breakfast in the hotel and then on to the Castel St. Angelo. Of course I started out early and I didn’t stop as much to take pictures along the way so I ended up getting there at 8:30 and the place doesn’t open until 9am. So I opted to walk further up the river to the Piazza del Popoli. I think it took me about 20 minutes each way to get there. It is basically a square with an Egyptian obelisk and some fountains and the like. After the quick visit there I turned right around and visited the Castel. It is in truth a giant monument that had been used as a prison, residence of a pope and a few other things over time. I think the original foundation is Roman or maybe earlier and then it was modified and added to and rebuilt and the like until it is what it is today. It has an outer wall and you can get to the top terrace as well so there is a fair amount to do even though it is not really that big of a place. I stayed there for just a bit under two hours before moving on. The entry was 8 Euros but overall I think it was worth it. I am sure I took a fair number of pictures.
After leaving the Castel I moved on to see if I could visit the Mausoleum of Augustus but it is blatantly obvious that the location has been closed for quite some time and they do not appear to be renovating it currently. I do hope they intend to at some point. It has a high fence around it which made it tough to get any pictures of anything and it was all really overgrown inside with weeds and other plants that showed it hasn’t been open for the duration. This is the second of this type of monument I have run into that does not appear to be open. In any event I walked around it then onto the Via del Corso where I walked back up the Piazza del Popoli and then back downwards again where my goal was the Fountain of Trevi. It is obvious that the Via del Corso is one of the shopping streets in Rome. I basically rushed through it.
The Fountain was fully overrun with people. As with other places of interest there were at least a half a dozen walking tours eating up all the space and making it generally overcrowded. I took a few pictures. It really is a beautiful fountain but it would be much nicer without hundreds of people crawling all over it and intentionally getting in the way of your photos and the like. Since it was close to lunch time and I was near a McDonald’s I decided to not go Italian for lunch. I figured the crummy burger would give me some protein I have been skipping throughout most of my lunches in Italy and I could compare it off to the US version. I had a McBacon something. It was basically a bacon double cheeseburger with something like Russian dressing on it. It was ok. Very similar to the US. I think the fries are better in the US. The packaging claimed the burger was 100% Italian beef. In any event it was something to kill a bit of time and to fill my stomach and overall I was not disgusted with it.
After lunch I moved on and found the Pantheon. This was under some renovation on the outside so one half is all scaffolding which is of course disappointing. The outside obviously looks very Roman and old. It is free to get in. You can buy an audio guide but I rarely do that. It is a very large dome and it is very crowded again with walking tours and other people and at times is tough to move around in. The inside has been of course Christianized, what else would the Italians do. It is a bit disappointing because I would prefer the Roman stuff stay non-Christian but I guess that is a bit too much to ask for. It is in incredible condition on the inside and is very beautiful I will give it that. Really very nice for a free visit. I was overall happy with the monument though I would like to have seen what it looked like on the outside just a bit better without the scaffolding. You can’t have everything of course.
Next along the course was the Piazza Navona. It is a square with another obelisk built into a fountain and two other fountains on it. There are a ton of people selling cheesy artwork all over the square and the place was overrun with statue mimes as well which is a bit annoying. Still it was less crowded than the Fountain or the Pantheon was. I bought a coffee gelato here that was much better than the crema gelato I had the day before outside the basilica. I spent a few minutes wandering the square eating it then I moved back on my way.
I basically knew where I was and I opted to just do a couple side street dives to see if I could turn up anything interesting but really it just kept bringing me back to places I was familiar with. I ended up coming up to the side of the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II which is the very large white building with 2 chariot statues on either side of it. It is a very large building. What I found is that you can get up on the top through this side entrance. They have a small cafeteria and you can walk around the majority of the lower roof and take pictures of the Roman skyline. They also have a paid attraction which gets you up to the top of the building basically where the two statues are. The lift ride costs 7 Euro and I paid it to get up there. I should point out the weather was absolutely beautiful at about 76F or so and with minimal clouds. The rain feared from the day before never came to pass then and the rest of the week is supposed to be clear and warm (to me). The morning started off in the low 50sF but I didn’t bother with the sweatshirt as it would only be extra weight for me. You can tell the true northern non-European tourists around here because they don’t have coats. The rest are all bundled up like it is mid-winter at the north pole in this 75F+ weather. Ah well. The top of the monument might be the highest place you can get in Rome except the dome of the basilica. Of course that was mobbed and this was a lot less crowded so I liked it a lot. It probably helped that I hadn’t climbed thousands of stairs in sweltering heat before getting to the top. In any event it gives a great view of the Roman landscape and you can see pretty much to the mountains when the weather is this clear. I was very happy that I paid the 7 Euros even if it probably is a bit of a rip off considering how far from the edges the safety railings are set. It does make it a bit tough to get some of the better pictures I would have liked to get but all in all I managed with what I was looking for.
After returning to ground level and leaving the monument I decided to head in to the hotel to rest for a few minutes. It was still only about 3pm but I had to do some research and I wasn’t sure if places I wanted to go would be places to just look at or to go inside. I figured I could use the pit stop and get a few minutes of rest and to look at email and the like. The Hotel Milo does indeed have a wireless internet connection but I have to be sitting on my toilet to reach it which is sort of awkward. Anyway I stayed for less than an hour and armed myself with a few places to look towards for tomorrow. I walked down to the Quirinale which is the home of the Italian president after being a papal residence in the past. It is not very far from the hotel but involved directions I had not yet walked so I figured it would kill some time to find my way there then to work my way back because it was still very early for dinner. Of course the weather was still perfect so that wasn’t a problem at all. I was hoping that by the time I returned to the area of the hotel it would be getting dark and then I could find some food.
The building of the Quirinale is very large and I was unable to actually circumnavigate it because the roads don’t seem to follow around it correctly. Nonetheless I tried and found myself turned into some odd locations for a bit. I had a basic idea of where I was so I was not too concerned with being lost. Aside from that while Rome is a moderately large city I have managed to figure out the main streets well enough that I can find my way back to the hotel with relative ease. It helps that certain landmarks are taller than any of the buildings out there. I would assume that the city has building ordinances keeping any structures from getting too tall that weren’t some form of monument already. It makes for a nicer looking city after all. It also helps to make certain monuments more visible from different points of the city. Using that I walked my way back to around the Palantine (which was not a really efficient direction but I was still trying to kill time.
When I got back to the region of the hotel it was just a bit past 5pm. Early by Italian standards when it comes to dinner but I was ready to eat. Still I did a bit of a loop around to see what I wanted to eat though I think I had already made up my mind earlier in the day that I was going to have Chinese food for dinner, probably about the time I chose to have McDonald’s for lunch. Today became my food vacation from my vacation in that sense I guess. The restaurant was just starting collect guests though the largest table was Chinese. I bet they got better food than I got. In any event, I ordered a beer and chicken with green peppers, which was listed as spicy, along with a bowl of white rice. The food was not the best Chinese food I have ever had but it was not the worst either. The spicy chicken had a bit of spice to it. More than any of the all’arrabiatas I have had here so far so that was sort of nice. It did have some odd jelly-like black mushrooms that had little flavor and a very chewy texture. I ate those first to get them out of the way. There was also red and green bell peppers and peanuts in it. I ate the whole thing so either I was very hungry or I liked it. Not totally sure but I guess I probably liked it more than anything.
After dinner I walked back towards the hotel and found a market where I bought a beer and a bottle of water for the room. I had to use my house key to open the beer bottle because I don’t have an opener with me but I have gotten reasonably good at that trick. The key I have is perfect for pulling out the lips on the cap so it will bend and loosen. The beer was a special Moretti called Baffo D’oro and while at first it smelled like it was going to be skunked actually tasted decent. I had that while I wrote this before getting to my wireless point to post it.
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