Roman Holiday

So elated to be devouring Roman pleasures with our eyes and tastebuds that we only realized  after 10 hours and about 12 miles of walking that we may have overdone our first full day in Italy.

We started with the bellissimo Borghese Gallery, set in the sumptuous 17thC getaway of Pope Schipione Borghese. The villa sits in the Borghese Gardens, a sort of Central Park in Rome. The gallery collection fills the villa rooms with sculptures by Bernini and paintings by Caravaggio, among others. Bernini's sculpture of Apollo trying to capture Daphne, who turns into a tree just as he grasps her, captured us!

The lover, who would fleeting beauty clasp
Finds bitter fruit, dry leaves are all he'll grasp

We walked through the heart of Rome dipping into churches, such as Santa Maria Vittori, with the amazing statue of St. Teresa swooning when visited by the Holy Spirit, the perfectly proportioned Pantheon, past the Trevi Fountain, to the Piazza Navona (again with the bulging muscles of Bernini statues in the fountains), over the Tiber River to the Castle St. Angelo (built by Hadrian, kitted out by the Popes as a safe house) and into St. Peter's. The international media are set up in a two story scaffolded temporary newsroom just on the edge of St. Peter's square waiting for Pope Benedict to do something/anything. When one walks out of the Basilica one stares into a blinding bank of klieg lights.

You've probably seen images of many of these sights, but one sight you've likely not seen is a man holding a pole in one hand atop which another man sits. These monks were on the bridge leading to the Castle St. Angelo and I looked at their arrangement for a long time. Dropping money into their bowl  brought me within a foot of these monks and I and saw no explanation for the phenom other than what you see here.

Today we head to the the Appian Way to visit the catacombs (Christians were buried just outside of the city in the early centuries AD) and then for a Trastevere stroll.