Sightseeing

Since I only have 10 days left in Rome, I have been trying to cram in everything that I still want to see.  I am really sad to be leaving and I wish I had a little more time, maybe another month.  I have seen so much here but I am disappointed about going home without seeing everything.  My friend Caroline came to visit last week.  She is studying in London and it was great because I got to do a lot of things I hadn't done yet.  We went to Piazza Navona several times, which is one of my favorite places here because it is always so lively.  We also went into a lot of beautiful churches, that I can't remember the names of but I should have written down.  One had a lot of famous sculptures and paintings done by Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and Raphael and we just happened to stumble across it.  I have been trying to go into as many churches as I can.  There are over 2,000 so I obviously can't see them all but some actually have really famous artwork inside that you would never know about without going in.

For my art class, we went to Sant'Ivo which was designed by Borromini.  It was really beautiful and I would have never found it because it was through an archway and couldn't be seen from the street.  Instead of having a dome on top, there was a spire that twirled around.

I also went to the Museo di Roma in Trastevere which had a photography exhibit on Neorealism that I really wanted to see.  The photographs were really nice, except the museum didn't really have anything else in it so I was kind of disappointed.

The next day I visited two more churches with my art history class.  The first one was San Clemente which was originally built by Constantine.  There is a baroque church there now but archaeologists discovered remains of the ancient church underneath.  We got to go three levels under the church and walked around old rooms and hallways.  On the second level was a medieval church that had used the ancient foundations to hold up their church.

After that we went to San Giovanni in Laterano, which is actually a Papal church and is considered to be part of Vatican City.  The original church on the location was originally built by Constantine as well.  Inside the church was beautiful and I am really glad I got to go see it because it was on my list of things to do.  Also, the front doors of the church are the original doors of the building that the Roman Senate used in antiquity.