Relax, Eat Gelato

Saturday June 10^th

After several days in a row of high intensity sightseeing, we needed to take a step back today.  We went to see one last church, and then took it easy.  The last church we wanted to see was the Basicila San Paulo, which was interesting for Paul to see. The church is informally know as St. Paul’s outside the walls, and is just outside the old walls of Rome.  The church looks very middle eastern with palm trees and desert imagery. I really like how these old churches retain more of the middle eastern influences on religion, and I also really like how many of them were built on old Roman temples and just sued the same basic structures.

San Paulo has the sarcophagus of St. Paul with his body inside, although his head is across twon at San Giovanni. Poor St. Paul.  The church also has great mosaics, again with the cool sheep with halos, and also 265 circular mosaics – one of every single pope. They ring the church.

After San Paulo, we hoped off the metro briefly at the Pyramide stop to se the large pyramid that an odd Roman nobleman built to bury himself.  Then back on the metro and off for lunch.

We ate a restaurant not far from the Trevi fountain, but down some side streets and around into a relatively quiet neighborhood.  We loaded up on appetizers (antipasta) again because they are so good. Today we had the fried zucchini flowers again, bruschetta and prosciutto. So good. Then we had pasta for the main dishes – I think Katie won out, her was the best hands down.  Paul had eggplant parmagian, I had fettuccine with mushrooms and Katie had spaghetti with a slight spicy tomato and pork sauce that made your tongue tingle.  Delicious!

After lunch we did a little shopping, finding a Roman gladiator bobble-head doll for Katie.  The Pope Benedict bobble-heads were very tempting to me, but I resisted. The we headed to Villa Borgehse park, the one area in Rome where there are trees and shade. The park was very nice with walking paths, old Roman ruins and a lake (actually a very small pond) where people could rent rowboats. A small offshoot of this pond seemed to be a turtle sanctuary. We saw one turtle, then another, and we soon counting them in dozens.  We saw more than 50 turtles swimming, sunning themselves and crawling around.  It was so cool. I have never seen so many turtles in one place before.  Some were teeny tiny, while others were huge. We stood there for a while and gazed at them. We found a shady place nearby and rested and read until early evening.

We then headed home and got our dinner before heading up to the apartment. We picked out a nice assortment of pastries at the local bakery, including regular and chocolate cannolis, and all got big gelatos. Katie was in heaven with pastry and gelato for dinner.  My mango and coconut gelato was super!

Later tonight we plan to head out to see the Colosseum all lit up and night and tomorrow will be our LAST DAY IN EUROPE.  I can’t believe our adventure is coming to an end, it has been an amazing ride.