Our First (Full) Day in Rome (March 2, 2012)

For our first full day in Rome, we scheduled a guided tour of the Vatican with an outfit called Context Tours. There are plenty of tour guides out there offering a wide variety in types of tours, but Context appealed to us because the tours are pretty small (usually no more than 6) and the guides are experts in a relevant academic discipline (our guide for the Vatican tour was an art historian who lectured in art and architecture at a local Italian university). So we didn’t have to constantly keep an eye out for our tour guide’s raised flag/umbrella/heraldic banner, and our guides were not only extremely knowledgeable about the subject matter of the tour, but also took the time to answer questions and even customize the tour to suit our group’s particular interests.

Based on our experience in Athens, we decided to walk from our hotel to the Vatican, which was about 1.75 miles (2.8km) away, to get a better feel for the city. We were supposed to meet our tour guide at 8am, so we left a little after 7 to give ourselves time to find some breakfast (and get lost). Rome is a beautiful city, especially in the peace of the early morning light and quiet.

The Tiber River in the tranquility of the early morning

We met our guide, Jose, just outside the entrance to the Vatican City, and were soon joined by two fellow tourists from Canada. Jose ushered us past Vatican security and soon enough, we were standing in the main visitor entrance area of the Vatican. Our tour began with a quick history of Vatican City and the papacy to give us some context for what we’d see. The next four hours were spent touring the Vatican Museum on what was essentially an extended art history lesson, with the benefit of being able to look at the actual art itself instead of just photos or slides of the art. The experience, even with an experienced guide, was overwhelming. The amount of art in the Vatican collection is staggering, and we had to skip entire galleries to keep our tour on time.

Courtyard in the Vatican

But of all the artwork that we saw that day, the one piece that had the most impact on me, was this:

Laocoön and His Sons

We saw quite a number of remarkable statues during our travels, but the Laocoön was definitely one of the most mesmerizing. Few other works so realistically captured human emotion, freezing the anguish, grief, and horror of Laocoön and his sons in time.

Of course, no Vatican tour would be complete without seeing the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica, which were both beautiful and awe-inspiring in their own right, fine examples of using art and architecture to teach the Bible to an illiterate population. This was a recurring theme in our travels through Italy, as we saw other ornately decorated churches that could best be described as “the Bible in architecture”.

The front of St. Peter's Basilica

Holly and Flat Stanley by one of the fountains in St. Peter's Square

When the tour ended, we were ready for a break, some time to process all that we had learned and let it soak in. And what better way to do that, than over lunch? At the recommendation of one of our guidebooks, we traipsed over to Insalata Ricca, just outside the walls of the Vatican. As the name suggests, Insalata Ricca is known for its salads. So we both ordered some crostini to start, a caprese salad for Holly, and a seafood salad for me.

Crostini with parma ham. Holly's wedding band included to illustrate size.
And yes, the crostini on the right has been ... sampled.

Holly's caprese salad.

My seafood salad. Yes, that prawn still has its head, whiskers and all.

The salads were large, and the vegetables looked good. Unfortunately, both of us felt that our salads fell kind of flat in the taste department. The vegetables were bland and tasteless, and the dressings were similarly uninspiring. The seafood on my salad had been frozen, not fresh, and didn’t taste that good. It was a pity, one of the few disappointing meals we had in Rome.

After lunch, we headed back towards the center of Rome, with an eye towards seeing the Pantheon. Somehow, we managed to walk right past it, and landed up in front of this:

Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II, a/k/a
"the wedding cake" or "the typewriter". It is big, white, and,
like many of Rome's monuments, pompously larger than life.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Inside, we found the Museum of Italian Reunification, which recounts the history of modern-day Italy, from its unification by King Vittorio Emanuele II (who got the building named after him) until the end of World War I (no mention of Mussolini or World War II). The real treat, however, was from the building's balconies, where you could see Rome spread out in front of you (we could have paid to take an elevator even further up, but we decided the view from halfway up was good enough, though in retrospect we do wish we'd done it). 

After the Museum, we stumbled upon the Basilica of St. Mary of the Altar of Heaven (Santa Maria in Aracoeli), one of the oldest churches in Rome, right next door. While not as grand or as large as St. Peter's (apparently no other Catholic church is allowed to be), St. Mary's was still an impressive church.

Our next stop was the Pantheon, which we did find on our second try. When we got there, it was closed for Mass (it’s now a church), so we settled for a photo from the outside. 

The Pantheon

By this point, we had been out all day and decided to head back to the hotel for a short break before dinner.

Dinner that night was at a restaurant called Asino d’Oro, which was recommended to us via, of all things, an app, specifically, the EatRome app. It is a restaurant that focuses on cuisine (including wine) from Umbria, in central Italy, and tries to combine both savory and sweet in its dishes (we had lots of chocolate flavors in ours). The Eat Rome app did not disappoint, this was a good recommendation.

Ravioli with dark chocolate and mushroom sauce

A spaghettoni dish with truffles and shaved almonds

Venison ham with a creamy lemon sauce and chocolate accents

Rabbit in a chocolate-flavored sauce. Yum.

Holly's dessert - some sort of chocolate truffle. 

I had homemade sorbet with a berry sauce for dessert.

Confession: We forgot to take detailed notes of this dinner. But our general recollection is that it was good. It was one of the pricier dinners we had in Rome (€83 for dinner and 3 glasses of good wine), but it was definitely good, with excellent service. While it wasn't the best or most value-for-money dinner we had in Rome, we definitely enjoyed our dining experience there.

After dinner, we somehow managed to roll/waddle back to our hotel, contented and happy with our first day of adventures in Rome. We turned in early that night--we had another Context Tour (Underground Rome) in the morning, and wanted to squeeze in a run before that. Which we'll get to blogging about... hopefully soon! :)