I woke up early for some reason and I killed a few minutes flipping through the couple hundred mostly non-functional TV stations (it must be satellite) until I found an Italian hockey game being re-aired. It was a dark arena and the players made most Boston area college teams look like 10 year pros but it was still something to watch. I suspect it was situated somewhere in the Alps region with the adverts on the ice and boards.
After killing enough time to get ready and start off with my breakfast at the hotel I walked down to a Da Vinci museum that was displaying a series of his larger inventions from drawings as made in the appropriate material. That is to say there were models of the various machines he invented. Obviously some of them worked and some didn’t, especially the flying machines but it was still an interesting idea to see them I thought. I arrived an hour before they were going to open so managed to get another coffee at a cafeteria and then wandered for a while until they let me in. I was the first person in and they hadn’t even finished turning on all the lights as I started through it. I did like the museum but it took maybe about 45 minutes to see and read everything there. I took a bunch of pictures. When I was leaving a family was coming in and the woman at the desk told them not to take pictures. No one told me that and there were no signs saying not to so I don’t feel like I cheated too much. Overall it was a bit too expensive at 9 Euros but I am happy I did it anyway.
After the Da Vinci museum I intended to go to the Villa Medici. It is a now French owned villa that was owned by the Medici (a strong financial family from Florence) and built up by one of the arch-bishops as well if I understood it correctly. Napoleon bought the villa and since it has been a home for French dignitaries as well as many artists who speak French. They take turns staying and working on various projects. The artists are all established artists it seems and they spend a lot of time either reproducing ancient art or who knows what else. Of course I also arrived about an hour early for the English language tour which started at noon so I walked into the park grounds that are considered part of the Villa Borghese which is a museum that you need to make reservations for. I knew this from Kate the woman I met the day before who said she had reserved her tickets for it. I didn’t reach the villa in this trip through because I was mainly trying not to be late for the ticket I had bought for noon. So I wandered a bit and bought a package of cookies to eat because I wouldn’t be done with the tour until after 1pm.
I got back to the Villa Medici with about 15 extra minutes and patiently waited out the time until the tour started. All the people on the English tour were Americans, two from Michigan and two from Philly. I talked a bit of sports with the guy from Philly which was nice. He agrees that Philly fans are horrible and said he wouldn’t bring his kid to an Eagles game until he was 15. I explained my experiences with Philly fans via the Winter Classic. He said it is usually worse there. In any event, our guide was Italian and her name began with an L I believe unfortunately she said it quickly and quietly so I didn’t really get it. She was nice and spoke English fairly well but it sounded as if she was concentrating on saying certain words so her accent was a bit exaggerated at times. All the same she knew a lot about Rome and the villa so it was a good tour.
The tour is of the gardens in the villa. The actual villa is privately owned and is off limits to tourists. I was surprised that the main gardens didn’t have any flowers. According to the guide that is typical of Italian gardens of the sort. They instead do geometric shapes of rocks and sand. It is basically what we saw but I figured with the climate it would be easy for them to grow flowers. Also it is a French owed estate and the French definitely did flowers. All the same the grounds were fairly large. The better side of the villa is inside the gates so I was glad I got to see that. The tour takes you through the gardens and shows you some artwork that the various artists that have stayed there have made including a series of 8 statues that had been recreated from statues found in ruins in Rome. Also you get to see a room that used to be a tower along an ancient Roman wall that had been frescoed and was in the state of being restored as they found a thin veneer of marble underneath some wallpaper that had been put in the room. It was interesting and the frescoes were fairly well maintained even with the humidity and light that appeared easily able to get in.
After that we visited a room with a bunch of plaster reproductions of statues and one marble statue of King Louis XVIII though it is believed it was started as a statue of Napoleon then recommissioned when Napoleon was sent into exile. Lastly we got to visit the grand room which had 8 really well restored tapestries from King Louis the XIV. They were very colorful. She said they were restored recently. The whole tour took about an hour and 15 minutes and she told us a lot of information I could not remotely repeat in this blog but it was interesting and very fun. I did manage to get a picture of the guide though I made her blush of course. After the tour I chatted with the guy from Philly for a few more minutes before moving on to get back into the park of the Villa Borghese, it being right around the corner.
In there I had lunch in the form of a Pizza Napoli which unfortunately meant with anchovies (I didn’t know that and there were no descriptions on the menu. It was top of list and I assumed it would be simple. I guess it was but the anchovies definitely were not my favorite though I ate all but the equivalent of one slice of it.). I rounded that out with a beer and then after leaving that place found a mobile snack shop and bought a chocolate gelato which I ate while walking through the park.
The park is very large and I wandered around for a few minutes while heading towards the Villa Borghese to see the outside of the building anyway, knowing I couldn’t get in. Oddly, Kate and he friend were there very early waiting for their 3pm reservations. I chatted with them for a few minutes. Apparently the place is very strict on what you can bring in and no pictures and you have to go in at the set time and you have 2 hours to do the site and get out. It is not a tour per se, you go in on your own but they apparently let people in in groups and there is generally a large line to both stow bags in the baggage check then to get into the museum. It sounded like a terrible hassle really. I chatted with them for a few minutes while they were killing time then when they were going to line up at about 2:45 to get inside I said goodbye and continued my walk around the park. I definitely did not attack the park in the most efficient manner. It has a zoo but the zoo costs 12.50 Euros and I was not into paying that much at all so I skipped it. I was curious to find the Piazza Thorvaldson because of the name and I had a very unpleasant time doing so. The map of Rome I have does not cover this park and the maps in the park were far too infrequent to be useful. I made a couple wrong turns in guesses and that sent me back to where I started the park before I regrouped and set back to finding the place. As I said my stubbornness paid off but with little reward as I cannot really say why it was named such. I can say there are a lot of statues of non-Italians in the park. Many different people who “liberated” different countries in whatever context that means. I also so the museum of modern art which I of course will not visit because modern art is more lost on me than older art is.
By this point it was rolling around to 4pm and I figured I should head back to the hotel. I was in a new area of town for myself and I made a couple guesses based on my Rome map and was correct so much so that it took me about half an hour to get back to the hotel. I had been expecting much longer. There were a couple steep hill climbs in this part of the town but all in all I was able to get in and relax and write a fair portion of this before heading out for dinner.
For dinner I rounded the corner to Ristorante Il Condor. It was pretty much basic I guess. I had a beer and a lasagna for dinner and followed with a café Americano and a tiramisu. The food was good and the service reasonable. The prices were pretty much the same as anywhere else I’ve been. They didn’t try to sell any extras to ring up the bill higher and they include service and all that in their prices which is nice. I didn’t really have a lot of soul to decide what to eat so I basically ordered what the Swedish guy next to me ordered honestly. I am not sure why, just maybe getting a bit tired of Italian food. In any event the tiramisu was ok but not the best dessert I have ever had. The coffee was good, not too chalky though obviously made with the espresso press like all coffee is around here. I think if I skipped the coffee and the dessert I could have come in at 11 Euro or so. As it is I paid 18.50. I should say the servings were large because they were, so there is that. I realize as I am putting up Euro values that you really need to multiply everything by 1.5 to figure out a US dollar guestimate but I try not to think about exchanges during trips or it gets to be too much. Being on vacation the last thing you should be doing is worrying about your budget. You can do that after you get back and sort everything out.
I haven’t decided yet what to do with day 15. I have managed to see most of Rome itself a couple times over and the thing I wanted to do which was visit the Villa Este and Hadrian’s Villa are closed for the winter since Halloween so I missed that. I may just have to tromp around town one more time.
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