Day 9: Rome

 Sunday, October 10, 2021

Our main goals for the day were to visit the Rome temple and hopefully to visit the Catacombs of Priscilla. The Rome temple is located on the northeast outskirts of town and requires about 1.5 hours to get there by public transport. We left pretty early so we could also make it to the 9 am church service next door to the temple. We lucked out and ended up running into a set of missionaries in the main train station, also heading out there, so we just closed our transit apps and tagged along with them the rest of the way there. The ward we visited seemed to be the magnet congregation for expats in the area; it seemed almost half of the congregation was comprised of native English speakers. There were headsets available for English translation of the service.

Afterwards we headed over to the Visitor's Center for the temple. The sister missionaries gave us a well-intentioned and helpful but very drawn out tour. The stained glass mural was very impressive. We didn't realize how much symbolism it contains. There are small elements throughout the entire mural (over 150) representing various stories of Christ from the New Testament. For example, there were women carrying loaves and two fishes, Lazarus, a talent hidden under a stone, jars from the wedding at Cana, and the list goes on and on. We also got to see the replica of the Christus statue and 12 apostles from the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen. We saw the originals seven years ago, but unlike the statues in Denmark, we were able to take photographic evidence of the ones in Rome. :) 

Mark is not always a great photographer

We found out while we were in church that we were able to secure last-minute tickets to the catacombs with an early afternoon reservation. That required a bus adventure from the temple. As we have learned, the Rome bus system is not nearly as reliable as systems in other countries; we waited about half an hour for our first bus and about 15 minutes for our second bus due to scheduled buses not showing up. Luckily we had given ourselves plenty of time to get over to the catacombs.

While we waited for our reservation time, we grabbed a quick pizza lunch from a nearby restaurant. We've eaten a lot of pizza. It's one of the easiest and cheapest things to order as carryout from a restaurant. My pizza had prosciutto and mozzarella on it. I also feel like I've eaten more prosciutto in the past week than I normally eat in an entire year. No complaints about that. We still had some time to kill after lunch, and there's no better way to kill time than by eating more gelato! This time, we went to a place that specializes in cremolatos. Cremolatos are similar to the granitas, except less sweet and with more chunks of real fruit. The place we went to, La Casa del Cremolato in the Trieste neighborhood, was fabulous. The lady working there was so kind and helpful in explaining the concept of a cremolato to us, and she also let us have some samples. I tried the fig cremolato, but ended up choosing half cantaloupe and half cream gelato. Mark chose half lemon (it was so wonderfully zingy!) and half cream gelato. I would highly recommend this spot to anyone in the neighborhood.

So on to the catacombs! The Catacombs of Priscilla claim to have the oldest known images of the Virgin Mary, from about 250 AD. We had a small group of 11 going through the catacombs together, with a university student as our guide. Unfortunately no photos were allowed, but it was really cool walking through the aisles of stacked tombs and seeing various Biblical scenes depicted on the walls. It was the first catacombs experience for both of us.

On the way back to our hotel, we stopped by the Pantheon again to hopefully go inside. The line was ridiculously long again, and apparently they don't let you in on the weekends unless you reserve a pass online. We'll try again tomorrow. We took a quick break in our hotel before a long evening of walking!

Our first stop was the Circus Maximus (we took a very crowded bus most of the way there). The Circus Maximus was the largest outdoor arena in ancient Rome, used for chariot races and gladiator contests. It predated the Colosseum and could hold 150,000 people. Mark was especially interested in this site because it was featured in several Asterix comics. 

Ave, Caesar! Morituri te salutant!

Then we walked toward the Colosseum. We were so frustrated with our Forum/Colosseum experience yesterday that we neglected to take any photos. So we checked off that box and then headed to a completely different part of town, the Trastevere neighborhood on the other side of the Tiber river. 

We decided to do a Rick Steves walking tour through the neighborhood, but we were honestly a little disappointed. The directions were a bit challenging to follow and the tour ended up being much longer than anticipated because we had to pause the audio so frequently. Not to mention, we were STARVING! We ate dinner at a restaurant in the neighborhood which serves typical Roman food and employs people with mental disabilities. We both ordered Roman specialties: Caesar salad, saltimbocca, and rigatoni (rather than spaghetti) alla carbonara. The Caesar salad was not served with parmesan and the salad dressing was as thick as pudding so that was a little different. And my carbonara was fine, but I have to say that I like the style I make at home better. Any bite I took with some of the fried pork in it was overpoweringly salty. Mark was satisfied with his saltimbocca experience; it did indeed jump into his mouth except for the bites that were heavy on the sage.

Saltimbocca and Carbonara

It was a 30 minute walk back to our hotel, but the transit options didn't look promising. It was cold and extremely windy so we booked it walking and shaved 6 minutes off of Google's estimated arrival time. There is supposed to be a country-wide strike tomorrow with some labor unions so we're a little nervous about how that will affect our plans, but we're hoping for the best.

Observations:

• You can read your daily horoscope on the TV screens on the subway trains!
• Compostable shopping bags seem to be the only acceptable option in Italy. They held up much better than I thought they would, although we haven't been carrying copious quantities of groceries.