Yesterday, Sunday the 5th, was our first free day. Four of us spent it by heading first to the "Wedding Cake," the Monumento Nazionale di Vittorio Emanuele, in which are some museums commemorating Italy's history since it's unification in the later 1800s. It was fun to have done, but it turned out to be sort of disappointing. We didn't know any Italian history, so we only recognized two or three names, and didn't care about most of the exhibits (tons and tons of Italian flags, uniforms, guns, other weird little relics with a very nationalistic flair). The museum felt very nationalistic, like you would expect to find in Soviet Russia - probably a remnant of the fact that the museum was built under Mussolini and the Italian Fascist government. There's an elevator to the top of the monument, which would have been awesome, but the girls didn't want to pay for it, understandably, so we left.
We walked down the road to a weird little site - la Bocca della Verita', the Mouth of Truth. It's a giant medieval manhole cover with a face on it outside a church. You're supposed to stick your hand in - legend has it that it will clamp down on a liar. We did so unscathed, and marched back up the Capitoline to the Piazza Venezia just in front of Vittorio Emmanuele. We walked down the main street radiating out from VE, which was the first totally commercial street we'd been to. It was lined completely with shops, so we had fun going into a bunch of them. By chance, we ran into the other three girls in our group (a bizarre coincidence - we have no communication and we're in a city of 3,000,000), but then split up for lunch again. Zara wanted to see The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_Saint_Teresa), so we walked about a mile northeast. The church it's in was closed (the Italians shut down for several hours in the middle of the day for lunch. It's the most frustrating thing!), so we wandered off and happened on a famous plaza - the Piazza della Repubblica (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piazza_della_Repubblica_(Roma)). On the left, we spotted a big brick Roman ruin, predictably deteriorating. We didn't know what it was but decided it was big enough to be worth checking out.
Well, we blindly walked inside... to find a soaring, majestic, ornate basilica hiding in the ruins of an old Roman bath complex. It turns out that we had found the Baths of Diocletian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baths_of_Diocletian), in it's renaissance reincarnation, the Basilica of Saint Maria of the Angels and Martyrs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_degli_Angeli_e_dei_Martiri). Unbelievably, this bath complex, built around 300 AD, was bigger than the Baths of Caracalla - and was the largest bath complex in the world. Its footprint is still visible from the sky today, giving a glimpse into how the entire neighborhood around the present-day basilica was once part of this (and therefore given its shape by) this complex. The basilica we found now occupies one of the largest rooms of the former baths, and retains eight of the original columns used to support the ceiling. Other than that, you would never know that this incredible piece of architecture looked like a dilapidated ruin on the outside. The renovation of the baths, which had been out of use for around 1000 years, fell to Michelangelo, and became his last architectural project. I would say he did a pretty good job with it.
We exited the basilica and walked back to the church with the sculpture of St. Teresa, which was open again. But a man at the door asking for money refused to let the girls in the church, seeming to cite their skirts as inappropriate. I went in to take pictures for them, and the man admitted me after I coughed up a euro. A minute later, he let the girls in too, leading us to suspect he was simply a conniving gypsy, not a representative of the church. The Ecstasy was pretty cool - a work of Bernini. I'm not a huge art critic so I don't know what else to say about it, but the walls around it were cool - the stone had been carved so as to bend traditional 2D space, with some sculptures running over or into others.
Finally we went home. It rained, but we survived, as I had brought a rain jacket and umbrella.
That night we went back to the restaurant we had been the night before. (Accidentally - some of the girls wanted to explore new areas/eateries, but the group seems to have some navigational issues. I made the executive decision to stay when we passed; the sun was setting, the girls had lost themselves several times already, the walk was about a mile downhill on a road that may not have had sidewalks in an area we'd never been. There was some tension at first, but...) We ended up having an even better time last night than we did the night before. Marizio was flattered that we had returned with even more people (all seven of us were here this time), and throughout the course of the night, provided us with bruschetta, two rounds of lemoncello shots, and nutella pizza "as a gift" to us. Maurizio tutored me for the second time on how to eat my spaghetti properly (I had carbonara this time); he asked all of our names (which he uniformly mispronounced). Hilariously, he also had me translating for all the English-speaking tourists all night. The attractive waiter/bartender was there again, and after awhile he caught on that we were all talking about him. He ran with it - he took a shot with us (at Maurizio's insistence) and willingly posed for photos at the end of the night. As we left (almost four hours later!) he kissed all the girls on the cheek. They were so excited! (Alas, I only got a handshake... :[ ) On top of all the free stuff Maurizio had given us, he vastly undercharged us again, and refused our money when we offered him more. We left with him urging us to come back, which we promised to do soon.
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