Rome Day #3

Thursday was a completely free day in Rome for the students (and faculty). From what I heard afterwards, different groups went to a variety of places: the Borghese Gardens, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain, St. Peter-in-Chains, etc. Everyone made it back to the hotel at the end of the day, so I suppose we can count the time as a success.

My family went to the Testaccio neighborhood, an area I had never visited on my four prior trips to Rome. We saw the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius, built by an ancient Roman nobleman as his burial chamber; it was smaller than its Egyptian counterparts but with the same proportions. Next was the Protestant Cemetery, begun in the eighteenth century and containing several notables, including John Keats, Percy Shelley, Richard Henry Dana, the son of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Antonio Gramsci. After the circus of the previous two days, the cemetery was blessedly uncrowded and peaceful. We spent more than an hour there before walking down the road to look at "Mount Testaccio," which looks like an ordinary hill or ridge, but is actually an ancient trash dump for earthenware pots that piled up for 500 years. Returning to the pyramid, we visited the small museum in the gate of the ancient city wall adjacent to it; it contained a number of artifacts discovered at Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient port.

After exhausting the sights in the immediate area of the pyramid, we walked south along the Via Ostiense a little more than half a mile to the Museo Montemartini, which is a branch of the Capitoline Museum. It was certainly one of the most unusual museums I had ever visited: hundreds of pieces of ancient statuary and mosaics were displayed in the city's first power plant, which still contained all of the original machinery from the 1920s. The juxtaposition of the statues and machinery looked strange, to say the least. However, there were no crowds, and the kids were able to run around to an extent.

After leaving the museum, we lunched in a nearby cafeteria and then proceeded farther south to the church of St. Paul's-Outside-the-Walls, which contains the tomb of the Apostle Paul according to Church tradition. I had forgotten how big the place was; it's one of the largest churches in Europe. We enjoyed walking around the place and even paid to enter the cloister and attached museum, which contained a number of interesting documents (papal bulls and the like) and reliquaries. Again, the crowds were light, so this was by far the most enjoyable day for me in Rome.

We took the subway back to our hotel's neighborhood and did some grocery shopping at a supermarket for another picnic supper. The kids had not been eating the hotel's breakfast food, so we bought some yogurt and other things we figured they would consent to eat the following morning. I think we got back to the hotel well before any of the students (around 6:00) and retired early because we had to be up early the next day for the bus to Pompeii . . .