The Forum

Well, today we spent our time seeing some more of the sights. I got up, packed my camera, and headed out, but I left my memory card in my laptop at home, so it was more or less dead weight to me. Needless to say, I don't have any photos from today, so sorry kids. I wanted to post up something though, so here's the map I made last night for how to get to the Campidoglio, the capital buildings of Rome, where we were meeting this morning.


It was pretty fun to make, but I didn't have time to write in street names. Grr. It was ok though, we got there on time anyway. So the Campidoglio has for a long time been an important place in Rome, but it became what it is today when a little guy named Michelangelo completely redesigned the place into a beautiful piazza surrounded by three buildings. A nice composition, you might say. From the capitol hill, we walked down a hill to the Roman Forum, the seat of power in ancient Rome. Today it is just a ruin of course, but the scale is incredible. We're talking columns made of a single piece of stone forty feet long, and weighing in the neighborhood of a thousand tons. Absolutely rediculous. A quick sketch I did in the forum:


From here we visited such structures as the Basilica of Constantine and the complex on the Palantine. If you know what those are, you understand how impressive they were. If not, let me just say that these are intense. We're talking the scale of a football stadium, made nearly 2000 years ago. In a way, you just kind of go brain dead, because if you try to think about it you just feel overwhelmed. Especially because we saw so much today, it became a sort of information overload.

After that we walked (despite the fact we had already walked like 10 miles today) to Isola Tiberina to a certain little gelato (ice cream) shop. Yes, Carla, it was incredible, and thanks so much for the recommendation. We also met Scott Finn (our professor) wandering around, and talked with him for a little bit. So then we went home, slept, and now are looking for a night out on the town. Being a bunch of architecture dorks, that means going into historic Rome and seeing all the buildings at night. I'm especially interested in the Pantheon. Ok, talk to yall later, chao!