Day Three -- October 30, 2012

After our usual breakfast of rolls and orange juice, we headed out on what I had planned to be a nice light first day in Roma.  We headed down the large and very upscale shopping street of Via Del Corso to the Galleria Alberto Sordi.  This was a very beautiful old shopping mall created in 1923 with a huge glass ceiling and two cafes mid-mall where I had a cappuccino and Mike had a tea.  We then headed down Via del Tritone to the very large, noisy traffic circle that is Piazza Barberini.  We went downstairs to the Metro station where we only had change enough to buy three Metro tickets at 1.50 Euro each.  We took the Metro to the next stop, Piazza Repubblica and walked across the street to the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli where a very lively demonstration of some sort was going on with music, dancing and lots of chanting -- none of which we could understand.

The church was once the great central hall of the Baths of Diocletian (about A.D. 300) and was designed by Michelangelo in 1561 who used the baths' main hall as the nave keeping the original walls of the baths as the front of the church.  The church was very beautiful inside with lots of marble, statues and pillars including eight red granite columns from the original baths.

 



In the marble floor of the church is a sundial and meridian line which was completed in 1702 and still keeps track of the time and date through a little hole high up in the wall on sunny days.



After lunch of a pannini sandwich, wine and beer we found our way to busy Via Nazionale and walked twenty minutes back to the grocery store to buy more wine, Kleenex, Ringos (kind of like Oreo cookies, but much, much better), bananas and water.  We dropped the groceries off at the apartment and then walked towards the Pantheon and ran into the surprising Piazza Di Pietra.

Out of nowhere in the middle of "old" Rome, truly ancient smacks you in the face.  The facade belongs to a 2nd-century temple to Hadrian that, having fallen out of use over the centuries, became incorporated into the side wall of the Stock Exchange and Chamber of Commerce!  Excavation of the columns and basement area in 1925 revealed the full glory of the facade we see today.

We walked back to the apartment to clean up and to call Wells Fargo so Mike could figure out why his credit card was rejected yesterday and got it settled without much trouble.  It was starting to rain a little when we left the apartment at 7:00 to walk back towards the Pantheon for dinner at Il Buco, Via S. Ignazio, which was a Tuscan restaurant I had read about.  We split an order of spaghetti vongole (clams), veal picatta and roasted potatoes with a very nice bottle of Brunello di Montalcino wine.  Mike and I are light eaters so we regularly split dishes and as is kind of normal in Italian restaurants, they feel we have not eaten enough, so we get free deserts!  They served us a nice complementary plate of cookies and two generous glasses of Vin Santo wine (a sweet desert wine that is perfect for dipping cookies into).  A family was sitting near us and Mike found out they were from Germany and we talked to them a little before we left for another restless night.