One minor annoyance about Rome:

So few bathrooms I'm willing to use, so many fountains with constant running water. . .

(no subject)

Yesterday, we saw the Trajan's Forum area, went back to the Jewish neighborhood for lunch (I'm pretty sure I haven't blogged yet about how cool the tour of the old ghetto neighborhood was -- our guide was a young (cute!) woman whose family lived in the ghetto for hundreds of years (until her mother sold the apartment in the eighties, just BEFORE the neighborhood was gentrified and their old apartment is now worth hundreds of thousands of €, not that she's bitter at her mother or anything), who knows EVERYBODY in the ghetto neighborhood, and loves Rome, and wants you to love Rome, and, specifically, the Jewish neighborhood of Rome, as much as you do.

It's a good tour, if, y'know, you are okay with having the tour interrupted every once in a while by people coming up to your tour guide and talking to her and introducing themselves to your tour group and talking at you and telling you stuff. Which I am quite okay with.

Anyway, so, yesterday, we went back to that neighborhood to show at the synogogue gift shop (it's a synogogue that was built in the early 20th century when the ghetto was turned from an absolute sty of a slum into a pretty nice neighborhood, and it was designed to compete with all the cathedrals around, which it does), and then we got lunch there.

And then we went to Ostia Antica in the afternoon.( Read more... )