When in Rome...

I finally got the chance to go to Rome last weekend and it was amazing! It was beautiful and it was so cool to see all the places that I’ve seen so many times in movies! I thought about Gregory Peck a lot while I was in Rome. While I was walking around I thought of Roman Holiday because it’s one of my all-time favorite movies! And while I was at the Vatican I thought of The Scarlet and the Black, a World War II movie he’s in that Mom loves. And then I had a professor that looked like Gregory Peck and he told us a story about il Campo dei Fiori, so while I was there I thought of Gregory in a round-about way. My train got into the Roma Termini Station at about noon on Friday afternoon. Friday was really great because my cousin, Alan Whitacker, was also in Rome with two of his sons so we spent the day together. Their train got in after mine so I made my way to the Spanish Steps and ate the sandwiches Rita had packed for me there. I met Alan at il Campo dei Fiori (a piazza) and we made our way to the Vatican. I absolutely loved the Vatican! It was incredible! We went through most of the museums and the Sistine Chapel first. That was so, so cool. I love seeing the works of art that I studied in my humanities class last fall. My favorites were School of Athens and the Sistine Chapel. We made our way to St. Peter’s after that and it was absolutely amazing. The basilica is huge!! It’s beautiful inside. Probably my favorite part of my entire trip to Rome was seeing Pietà. It is incredible. I loved it so much. On Saturday I had extra time and I considered going back and waiting in the line again just so I could see it one more time.

After the Vatican we were hungry so we made our way to the Pantheon because Alan had read about a restaurant near there that we wanted to try. It was very good, but the best part of the evening was dessert. On our way to the restaurant Ethan, one of Alan’s sons, noticed a store with a huge wall of candy, so naturally he was drawn to it. We went inside and found that it was gelateria. Not just any gelateria. There were TONS of flavors and they all looked delicious. Every flavor you could imagine! They had at least 15 different variations of chocolate! There were at least 100 flavors (probably about 110 including all of the soy ice creams) and I really wanted to try every one of them! It took us forever to decide. I got kiwi, banana split, and chocolate coconut. It was incredible. It was pretty late at that point and Alan wanted to go to the Trevi Fountain. It was really cool at night. After seeing the fountain I made my way to my hostel which was pretty close and they went to their hotel which was in the opposite direction.

The hostel was alright. I met some really nice people there and I actually talked with some of them for a long time. I didn’t sleep very well because it was sweltering in that room and the window was open to try to cool it down a little bit, but all that did was let in the noise from the street. I ended up waking up pretty early and leaving. I bought some little pastries and ate them at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. I then made my way to the Colosseum. It was awesome and I loved it! It was a very hot day so that wasn’t very fun but I got to see tons of cool things so it was alright. From the Colosseum I went to the Forum and explored that for a couple hours. When I saw the Pantheon the night before, it was closed, so I went back so I could see inside. After that I took a bus to la Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth). They go there in Roman Holiday so I just had to see it. That was cool, but it didn’t take very long. In fact, nothing took nearly as long as I had anticipated. I had planned to be in Rome until Monday. At that point it was about 1:00 in the afternoon and I had been to everything on my list of places to go in Rome. I was all alone and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. It was kind of nice to be on my own because I could go at my own pace (which happened to be very fast that day), but at that point I decided I didn’t like being along. I decided that there was no need for me to stay overnight on Sunday since I’d already finished everything I’d wanted to do. The next day, Sunday, all that was on the agenda was to go to church and then to the temple site. I was really excited to do that. Now Rome is an amazing city and there is tons to do, but I was alone and extremely tired and I just wanted to be back in Siena. I kind of alluded to that fact at I talked to my mom and she suggested that I just go home then. It made sense, so I did it. First I went back to Della Palma for one last gelato. I got apricot, kinder bueno (a candybar with milk chocolate and white chocolate), and strawberry. I asked for the flavor grape-strawberry and I was so excited about it but it was loud and the guy only heard the strawberry part. I wasn’t in a mood to be critical so I just let it go. It was delicious. I stopped by the Trevi Fountain, threw a coin in, and then went to the station. There was a train leaving for Siena in 10 minutes. It was perfect. I got on and made it back to Siena before the sun set.