Spring Weather

The past few weeks in Rome have been really nice, in the 70s every day.  This weather has made my on-site classes much more pleasant and I have seen a lot of new sights throughout Rome.  For one of my art classes, we went to the Botanical Gardens of Rome, which was actually really close to where I live but I never knew about.  The Botanical Gardens were really peaceful.  There were plants and trees from all over the world.  There was a Japanese garden and in one of the greenhouses, an inside rainforest had be re-created.

Since it was nice out, some of my friends and I decided to visit a lot of monuments in the middle of the night.  We went to the Vittorio Emanuel monument, the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon. It was really cool seeing all the monuments at night because it was so quiet and empty.

For my art history class, we went to the Baths of Diocletian.  I thought we would be able to walk around the bath complexes, like the Baths of Caracalla, but apparently a basilica is now at the site.  The basilica has used a lot of the walls and bricks from the baths so we were still able to get the general idea.  We then walked over to one of the national museums (I think Rome has five total).  Inside, we saw original frescoes that were in Roman villas.  They were beautiful and still had most of their color.  The Romans liked to put nature themes inside their houses so they could feel as though they were always outside.  The frescoes had colorful pictures of forests and hills.  After that, we saw statues from the Imperial portraiture period.  My favorites were the "Discus Thrower" as well as the statue showing Augustus in robes.