Rome – Day 0 and Day 1
Saturday, 15-Apr-2023
Tags: Travel
On early Saturday morning, we took Ryanair (for the first time) to Rome, eating breakfast in the Priority Pass Lounge before boarding. We landed in Rome around 3PM. We didn't have any immigration because we were coming from Spain, and took the next Leonardo Express train to Roma Termini. Our hotel for the MEF conference was the Starhotel Metropole, a 10-minute walk, which incidentally was the only time it rained during our trip (but we had our good rain jackets so all good).
On this trip, the goal was to reprise some of the old favorites that we saw last time and add some new ones. This is a map of the places that we (mostly Eileen) visited in Rome proper.
For a change of pace, we decided to eat Indian food and had a wonderful dinner at Gandhi 2, about a 10-minute walk from the hotel. After dinner, we walked to the Trevi Fountain and back.
The area around the fountain was really crowded!
On Sunday (April 16), we went to the Capitaline Museum, as Larry had not ever been there. We spent a couple of hours admiring some of the more famous works.
Medusa by Bernini (1640s).
The Capitoline Wolf is a bronze sculpture depicting a scene from the legend of the founding of Rome. The sculpture shows a she-wolf suckling the mythical twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. The age of the wolf is controversial (Etruscan or 12th century CE), but the twins were added in the 15th century CE.
Boy with Thorn is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze.
Of course we have to have a picture of the famous Marcus Aurelius equestrian statute, which dates back to ancient Rome (about 175 CE).
The museum also includes the Tabularium, which was the official records office of ancient Rome. There is an epigraphic collection in this long underground corridor. Of interest to us were ancient capitals with inscriptions in Hebrew, sourced from an ancient cemetery in the Trastevere distict of Rome.
The inscriptions reads, "How great was my fortune the day upon which I was quarried from the mountain! Thus, here I am; I am a crown upon the head of an honest man and I confer grace to every exhausted soul. It is for this reason his name is inscribed on the door, the honorable Mr. Shabbetai Cammeo, who died the fourth day of the week (Wednesday), the sixteenth of the month Tammuz (20 July) in the year 320 (1560)." This year in Hebrew is actually 5320.
At the end of the Tabularium, there is a great view of the Forum.
After the museum, we just walked around, enjoying Rome. We did pass through the famous Navona Square, with the famous Fountain of the Four Rivers by Bernini in 1651. The base of the fountain is a basin from the center of which travertine rocks rise to support four river gods and above them, a copy of an Egyptian obelisk surmounted with the Pamphili family emblem of a dove with an olive twig. Collectively, they represent four major rivers of the four continents through which papal authority had spread: the Nile representing Africa, the Danube representing Europe, the Ganges representing Asia, and the Río de la Plata representing the Americas.
We had dinner with a MEF attendee (Charles) at La Cicada e La Formica. We had eaten there in 2016 and enjoyed it. This time, the menu seemed more limited, but the ravioli and meatball dishes were very good. And the local atmosphere was still nice.
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Larry and Eileen Samberg
