Rome again, Rome again, jiggety-jig

[I blame my father entirely for any corny sense of humor I may have.]


There is always something more to see in Rome. And so, we made our way back to the Eternal City. Our previous tour was lacking one major element: The Sistine Chapel. We shuffled through the Vatican Museum's overwhelming display of treasures (my suggestion is: share the love. No one even notices the heaps of ancient sculpture lining every wall and corridor. Send just one of those bad boys to Mississippi, and we would build an entire museum for it.) I digress. We (along with a veritable hoard of other tourists) followed an endless maze of signs leading to the crowning glory of the Vatican's collection: La Cappella della Sistina. Photos are strictly prohibited, Sydney.



Vasari writes that Michelangelo's contemporaries (such as Raphael) advised the Pope to commission Michelangelo with the painting of the Chapel because they wanted to make him look bad. Michelangelo was a sculptor, not a painter. According to Vasari, he had never painted a fresco. He didn't even know the technique. His not so nice artist friends thought that it would help their own careers if they could expose a flaw in Michelangelo's seemingly perfect artistic skill. Clearly, his fellow artists completely ruined his career by creating a task too difficult for him to execute.


I also had a great desire to visit the Appian Way. Sydney and I took the metro to the stop "Via Appia" and found ourselves in the part of Rome that looks like Mexico. Strange, but true. We stumbled upon a random archeological site, but had a difficult time locating the old Roman road. We asked for directions and found ourselves in the middle of a huge park, in the boonies. Yes, Rome has boonies. There were sheep, chickens, streams, and of course some ancient ruins thrown in for good measure.



It was difficult to believe that I was still in Rome. Amazing, no?


"To come again on Rome by moonlight is a fitting close to such a day. . . Crossing from these thick patches of darkness, out into the moon once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear. . .


I had seen it [the Coliseum] by moonlight before (I could never go through a day without going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past all telling." -Charles Dickens, Pictures From Italy