Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Trevi Comfortable Terrace Apartment — Rome, Italy
Temps: Hi 88F (31C) / Lo 66F (19C)
Not that it is essential — most all of the locals we encountered today spoke English — but it sure makes getting around Rome easier if you speak the language. I don’t speak Italian; but Mui has a good conversational grasp — a carry over from when he lived in Rome for three years as a young boy. He took advantage of our encounters with the locals to practice his Italian and get us around Rome today.
No sleeping in this morning! Our day started early with breakfast on the terrace. Not a leisurely one, however, since we wanted to get going and start exploring.
As this is my first time in Rome, Mui is in charge of all the sightseeing for our three-week stay — you might say that he’s my live-in tour guide. After all, aside from having lived here for a few years as a child, he was in Rome for a week in 2011 with his mother, so the city is still “fresh” in his mind.
We put our shiny new transit passes to use to take a bus from the stop that’s a block or so from the apartment to the Della Valle stop in the city’s Sant’Eustachio District. We could have walked there probably, but nothing in Rome is as close as it seems on the map and we wanted to save our feet for all the ‘necessary’ walking we knew was ahead of us.
When we got off the bus, we detoured from our planned itinerary briefly to visit our my first church in Rome — the Basilica di Sant’Andrea Della Valle … the church where Puccini set the first act of Tosca. What a pleasure it was to walk into a church where we were the only ones visiting. And what an impressive introduction it was to Rome’s highly-gilded churches.
[Feel free to click any image for a larger version in my online gallery.]
 |  |
Vault over the nave. | Ceiling detail above the altar. |
