Friday Nov 24
Went to a little coffee and pastry shop a couple of doors down from the hotel. Croissants, or some pastry, and a cappuccino are the traditional Italian breakfast, and one of my favorites. Grabbed some eats there, but since Shell doesn’t like coffee and wants to stay away from gluten, she was out of luck. But there was a starbucks just around the corner from us so we were able to go there and get her a chai latte and some yogurt.

The Pantheon was a five minute walk from our hotel. We get tickets to get in. It was built by Hadrian in 126 AD as an homage to all the various gods the Romans worshipped, but was converted to a Catholic church in 609 AD. It features a truly enormous concrete dome. It is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

We ate lunch at a place called La Tavernetta 48.

Then we stopped outside the Palazzo Madama, which is the meeting house for the Italian equivalent of our Senate.

Just to the west of that is the Piazza Navona, originally commissioned by the emperor Domitian in 86 AD, and featuring fountains and sculptures by Bernini.

Then we walked to the Vittoria Emanuele II monument. But on the way, noticed a Feltrinelli bookshop, where I managed to find some books that are tough to get here in the states.

The Victor Emmanuel II monument  was built between 1885 and 1935 to celebrate the first king of Italy and the unification.

There is a museum about the unification inside…

…and a killer view from the top.

From there we walked to the Baths of Diocletian. These were public baths built between 298 and 306 AD. It has been turned into one of the National Museums of Rome.

We ate at La Campana, a restaurant that has been open continuously since 1516 AD. Yeah…. You read that correctly… over 500 years.

Italian meals, if you’ve never experienced them, consist of an appetizer course, a first course, usually of pasta, and second course, consisting of some type of meat and a side, then fruit or dessert, and then coffee (and by coffee, I mean Italian coffee… espresso), and maybe an alcohol based digestive afterward. I had coffee the first night, and slept 12 hours. Had coffee again the second night, and slept one hour, from like 5am to 6am. That was the last night I did that.