Shopping

I went to the market today, and found a stand selling all sorts of fine art wares. I decided to get some antique wooden coasters for my new apartment back in Auburn! Yay Doug, things for us! This is my first "souvenir" purchase since coming to rome. 13 Euros.

Gelato on Tiber Island

4:53 p.m. and about 60 degrees. I am sitting on Tiber Island, Leaning back on the embankment rocks, without a single cloud that can put a damper on the sky’s persona. Lying back and looking up to watch the erratic and random flight paths of the bird’s silhouettes in the sunset; Erratic, yes of course, but elegant in their own right. Wind from my right, I can hear the gentle flow of the river clash with the untimely event of a crazy Italian driver hitting his horn. The screeching of the trains pass by every three minutes or so; a lot less often, compared to the fluttering sounds of the speeding motorbikes. (watching them are quite amusing… ) I just ate a crème and strawberry gelato down here with Allen, Eric, Page, and April. Strawberry was excellent. Crème was alright with the cone. Not much more you can ask for at a particular moment, sitting on, arguably, the most important historical island, the sun setting in front, and the river flowing from the right with the Ponte Sisto in the back ground. Always in good Company.

Piazza di San' Pietro

I was expecting to spend my morning in the American Academy in Rome Library, but I have to jump through a few more hoops before they'll let me in. Instead, I went with one of my professors, Karen Rogers, to the Vatican. Most of the time that the large piazza out front, which looks something like a keyhole, isn't very densely crowded. Today, however, it was absolutely packed. Turns out that on Wednesdays the Pope makes his address to the people of the world, and pilgrims from many countries had shown up to hear him. Unfortunately I hadn't brought my camera with me, so I didn't get any shots of it, but it was incredible to witness.

San Giovanni

After visiting "my" church of San Clemente, we took a trip to a little place called The Lateran, the official church of Rome. I'm a visual person myself, so here's a picture.


So there you go, the primary church in the heart of Christendom. It's pretty impressive, and although it's hard to convey scale in photographs like this, I'm going to give it a shot anyway. Here are a series of shots showing the girls I went with today standing next to one of the columns you see on the first photo.















Yeah, we're talking pretty friggin' huge. And the amount of detail is nothing less than stunning. I do love column capitals, so how about some Composites?


What a crazy amount of detail for something 100 feet off the ground. And of course it only gets more spectacular on the inside, but I don't have time for that right at the moment. Instead, let me leave you with one last image to try to convey the sheer size of this building, bearing in mind it was first built in the year 313.

Photosynth: Colosseum

When I was wandering about the Flavian Amphitheater, I came across this series of arches that, in their incomplete state, created an amazing space. I spent several minutes just walking around among them, and decided to start taking some pictures. Well, now I've bound them all together into a photosynth. In case you haven't seen my previous photosynths, this is like a 3-D panorama -- it binds together photos so you can see where they were taken in space. It's kind of hard to explain. You should be able to click on the image below to download photosynth and play with it yourself. I think this one is my best yet.

San Clemente

Today was not just spent at the Colosseum, instead I went with some friends to some churches very special to us. San Clemente was one of them. This was a church I spent several weeks researching for my professor, Carla Keyvanian. I had practically memorized the plan of the building, and new so much information about it. And so now, finally, I witnessed it in person.


The church really isn't spectacular from the outside, at least not for a Roman church. What makes San Clemente so fascinating is the layers of history it holds. There are five different parts of the building, reaching back as far as 200 or 300 years BCE. What's really cool is three of these layers are churches: a pagan temple from about 100 CE, an early Christian church from about 300, and a Christian basilica on top of that. Three different levels, three different churches. For a few euros you can take a tour down through the levels, but we didn't feel that we had time for that today. I'm going to leave you with a photo of the church's spolia: column capitals that were taken from wherever they could be found. In the middle ages, artisans no longer had the expertise to make new columns, so they would just reuse them from older buildings, leading a mix-match of styles.

The Colosseum

(Did I spell it right, Carla?) Anyway, this was where I spent the better part of my day today. The plan was to spend a few hours in the morning in the Colosseum and then hit up a Catholic service. I mean, when in Rome, right? Well that didn't work out, mainly because there is just too much to see and do inside the Colosseum. As soon as I walked in (wearing my church clothes, no less), I instantly felt compelled to draw, so I picked a nice little seat and set to work. I didn't want to do the exterior or the main floor of the interior, they seemed too overdone. I really wanted to work on the rings of passages around the perimeter, and try to capture the depth that I could see in them. It took a little over an hour (I think), and here is what I ended up with.


Remember you can click on the image to see it bigger. I was surprised and pleased by the number of people who stopped to look over my shoulder for a few moments or to say how nice it was. I don't think it was the best work I've ever done, but I was pretty happy with it.

Shortly after, I wanted to try one of the drawing types we practiced before we came to Rome, the birds-eye axonometric. It's nothing fancy, and only took about 10 minutes, but it really helped to understand the space some more.


Sketchbooks are great, and I take mine most places with me. I think that the opportunity to take notes and sketch out problems and questions is always valuable. And after all the drawings I did over the semester, I've come to realize that you never really know a place until you draw it. To steal a phrase, a drawing is worth a thousand photographs.

Although I got some of them too.