Rome!

Weekend in Rome! Oct 6-7. 

Too many pictures, too little time. 

One of my favorite things about Italy is the water fountains and the clean drinking water :) 

It is early in the morning… I don't really know what I was trying to accomplish. 

Ruins!!! Real Roman ruins!! Yup - I'm an archeology nerd. 

More ruins!

AHHHHH. The colosseum! My first thought when I saw it was "huh, its real." Not the most scintillating statement, but for some reason it just didn't seem like a real object. 

Then I took some photos with it for proof. 

And inside… 

and with friends...

And by myself… 

Ok some background. My friends wanted a picture of them jumping in the air. I made them jump over and over again so I could get the perfect picture. Naturally, this took forever because we had to keep pausing to let people walk by. Their idea of revenge was for me to try to do a jumping picture. 

Obviously I was terrible at jumping. 

So i decided I would just pretend and crop the photo so my bottom foot wasn't included. When I saw this photo, i was so entertained I could't cut the photo. 

See! They managed to jump just fine - and in a dress!

After exploring the colosseum, we moved on to the Trevi Fountain. 

Screaming children EVERYWHERE. We decided to return later in the evening to avoid the crowd. 

After a quick drink :)

Made my wish!

A photo of the three travelers! 

Monument to Vittorio Emanuelle II - The First king of Italy. Enormous monument / building built of pure white marble. 

The Pantheon. 

Only half of the dome - it was huge!

A little history of the Florence Duomo and how it relates to the Pantheon. Ok - so back in the 14th century, Florence is a great power and the rulers want to build a humongous cathedral and baptistry so showcase their big-and-badness (is that a word?). Anywho, they start building a huge church. Then they get to the part where they build the dome and realize that there aren't any trees big enough to support the building of the dome. The art of building a self-supporting dome this huge was lost in the Medieval ages, so this architect / artist Brunelleschi went to Rome for many years and studied the Pantheon. He returned to Florence and declared that he knew how to complete the dome. He was paranoid that his main competitor would steal his knowledge and complete the project, so he said he would not share the information, he would only build the dome. He began, the dome was built (actually two domes, one inside of the other) and then died without sharing how it was built. The dome in Florence is the largest brick dome ever built, and was only passed up as the largest dome ever build with the advent of modern architecture. 

We went to the Vatican for Sunday mass and saw the Pope! It was a special mass (high mass?) to celebrate the crowning/ascension/naming? of new cardinals/bishops/something to Spain. At least that's what I thought it was for, a search on google finds "Pope Benedict XVI leads the mass of the opening of the synod of bishops on October 7 in St Peter's Square in the Vatican."  So I'm not quite sure what was happening. 

We were super excited that we were able to see the Pope, but very sad because of all of the other churches and museums in the Vatican were closed in honor of this special day. 

This is me - excited that I made it through the entire mass without a lightning bolt striking me where I sat. 

Ciao! Thanks for reading this long-overdue post. I will try to be more diligent about my blogging. <3