Today turned into an unintended adventure.
More on that presently.
We took the Metro to the Coliseum to visit
some churches nearby. Just in case we did not show enough photos last year, here are a few more.
The first church, San
Clemente but photography was not allowed. The crypt was something special,
but I did not experience it because I was unwilling to pay for something I
could not photograph. Joan however did see it and here is her account: An early
Christian era church was beneath San Clemente. Below that was a Temple of
Mithras and a fully formed Roman house with running spring water. It was
amazing to realise that layers of subterranean cities exist under present day
Rome, just waiting to be excavated.
The second church, Santi Quattro Coronati, was an unprepossessing
structure, but with some exquisite decoration,
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| English motto? |
especially in the interior Oratorio di San Silvestro. We snuck in
behind some other people otherwise we might had a long wait. The frescoes were
in unusually good condition.
Finally we visited San Giovanni Laterano – the Cathedral of Rome. There were quite a number of people in clerical garb in its vicinity. This is an
impressively decorated church, presumably befitting its status. There are ten
or a dozen large statues, and many paintings.
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| Saint Andrew |
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| Ceiling detail |
After lunch we headed back to base at
Piazza Barberini for a reposo, departing again at 3pm to fulfil one of my long-held wishes –
to walk on the Appia Way (Via Appia Antica). We got there easily enough, but that is when the
adventure began. After the bus dropped us we proceeded in the direction
indicated as being the Appian Way. There were a few other tourists at first,
but they evaporated after a kilometre or so. There was the occasional car,
horse and bicycle, but other than that we pretty much had the road to
ourselves. After the novelty of this wore off we began to consider how we might
get back. We had read about bus 118 that takes you back, but after an initial
map near the beginning there was no other helpful or useful information
whatsoever – zip, nada, zilch. Joan had read that this National Park was about 5
miles long. Considerably longer than we had intended, but we were enjoying it so much that we thought this might be an
achievable goal.
After about an hour and a half we started
to get concerned that there were no sign of civilisation emerging down the
road. Luckily for us another walker coming from the opposite direction came to
our rescue. He told us the end was still a long way away and that that we would
be better to retrace our steps as far as the most recent cross road (there had
been two). He gave some general instructions about what to do there. He wasn’t
walking much faster than us so he backtracked several times to ensure we were
going in the right direction. What a wonderfully helpful man. When we did reach
civilisation (most of the road we had walked was out in the country), a traffic
policeman (almost Inspector Montalbano) at a major intersection pointed us to
the bus stop where a bus would take us to the Cine Citta Metro station. This worked like a charm and we were back
home just before 7pm. I estimate we walked almost 2/3 of the road, perhaps 4 to
5 Km. We dedicate this walk to my history teach AP.
The actual road/walk very much lived up to
expectations – it is very pretty and mostly easy going along a dead straight
road. There were a couple of minor bends and dips. Most of the way was paved in
modern (flat) cobblestones, but occasionally there were short sections of
presumably original Roman stones. Some of these had ruts at angles to the
roadway other than what one would expect, so I presume they were reconstructed
in modern times.
We had dinner in nice place just off the
Via Veneto, enjoying a fixed-price menu with a nice 2012 Chianti and our
favourite panna cotta for dessert.
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| Via Veneto |
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