Touring Knights

On our last full day in Rome, we decide to get up early and see a few places without the crowds. Piazza Navona There is three fountains in this beautiful square. The four rivers fountain designed  by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1651 for Pope Innocent X. Pope innocents family palazzo faced on to this square and the church of Sant 'Agnese of which he was a Sponsor. The story goes that in later years Bernini travelling through the square in a carriage pulled the curtains shut and commented " oh why did I create that eyesore" The piazza Navona is built on the site of the stadium of Domitian which was built in the 1st century AD. By midday the sides of this piazza are lined with tables and the traders are selling paintings, etchings and the performers are playing their instruments it's an amazing place to be. The Pantheon with not a tourist in Sights. Still makes me go WOW The T...

Today we joined the wonderful Amy for a guided tour through  the Galleria Borghese.  The galleria Borghese art collection is housed in a Villa that is surrounded by the most beautiful huge garden in the heart of Rome. Cardinal Scipione Borghese was a very keen art enthusiast, and it is said that he would go to whatever lengths necessary to obtain a piece of art. He originally housed his collection in his cardinal residence near St. Peter's , but he moved it to this Villa in the 1620's. At that time this Villa was outside the city wall of Rome, which is hard to beleive because this area is so close (20 -25 mins walk) to the piazza del Popolo. The villa itself is decorated with the most beautiful frescos, it hurts your neck just trying to take them all in, they were amazing. The Galleria has the most wonderful art collection, including paintings by  Caravaggio and Raphael, and some pretty sensational sculptures including some by Bernini. I've beco...

Today started rather interestingly we decided to give the Roman bus service a go, but we really chose the wrong day.   Unbeknown to us, there was a huge protest planned,  and the protest route was straight through the route our bus should have taken, so our bus was cancelled.  After a 40 minute wait we gave up and caught a taxi, who had to drop us off a kilometre from our destination.  Protesting Roman style straight past the coliseum, past the Roman forum and past the Vittorio Emmanuele monument. There was literally hundreds of people, banging drums blowing whistles and chanting. The Ludus Magnus As we passed the protest, we passed these ruins Ok I ll fess up here I took this photo having no idea what this was, so using my resources effectively I messaged Amy and she filled me in, this is the Ludus Magnus, the gym and barracks of the gladiators ( which Amy had explained to us when we did the coliseum tour). There is an underground ...

I Ok , again this was another huge wow moment . . . So I could type in all the statistics about this wonderful monument. But I think I would rather talk about what really piqued my interest. Fortunately for us we had the delightful Amy (  http://www.luxeassociatestravel.com/ )   as our tour guide again and she was determined that we would really understand what we were going to see. She set the picture from the start. Including how we would need to hire a toga and how we would need to purchase our tessera (  a small terracotta token) to get in, each tessera would identify the entrance arch you entered. With the assistance of a book and electronic media we were shown how wonderful this building once was.  But what interested me was about the "theatre " of this place, you see I kind of had the Russell Crowe gladiator image of the coliseum. But Amy illuminated it for us. The forum show had several different performances throughout the day. The first ...

The Vatican   . . . Wow what can you say . . .  We had a pretty early start, Gadget booked us into the Pristine Sistine tour, which basically meant we were whisked through the entry and down several long corridors directly into the Sistine chapel.  The Sistine chapel was AMAZING I would loved to have shared some images with you but sadly the Vatican sold the copyright of the images to a Japanese television company for 20 years, to gain money to assist in paying for the restoration of the chapel. fortunately for those of you travelling to Rome in 2019 you will be able to photosensitive the copyright expires then. For me they will forever be etched in my mind.  I would love to say that the pristine Sistine tour was great, but to be honest I was a bit disappointed, the chapel was supposed to be pretty empty but it was pretty crowded . . . But Gadget tells me that when he was there 2 years ago it was very very crowded in there later in the day, like body to bo...