Follow-up

The Rome trip has definitely taken the laurels for least successful of our trips, but at least it happened--Dr. Cooper's husband broke his arm and required surgery the night before her flight to Venice, so she had to cancel her entire trip. Skipping our trip definitely would have been less stressful, but I'd have missed out on the chance to see Carla, not to mention the good times Sean and I did have at the end.

  Like climbing the dome of Saint Peter's--that was incredible!  Sean wanted to climb the whole way, but luckily for me, by the time we arrived the elevator was the only option. I say lucky because the elevator only takes you to the roof, from which it's an utterly exhausting climb up the interior of the dome itself.  You're in a tiny, cramped spiral staircase, with dozens in front and behind of you, and everyone charging up madly, heaving and panting--eventually you've reached such a point in the curvature of the dome that the space of the stairwell itself sharply slants to one side, and it becomes a really tight squeeze. The woman in front of me actually gave up just shy of reaching the top--she couldn't handle the close quarters.  Once you emerge onto the balcony, on the lantern above the dome, it's worth every butt-burning step, though. All of Rome is spread out in front of you like a blanket: the wedding-cake Vittoriano, the low, inconspicuous dome of the Pantheon, the wide acreage of the Borghese and Doria Pamphilij gardens.

We spent our last afternoon in the latter, the largest green space inside the city.  It's not as atmospheric as the Borghese with its little lake and Asklepeion, and not one really visited by tourists.  In fact, the tourist maps cut off just shy of that area.  So while I knew, generally, from having glanced at a broader map in a book plus having seen the vista from Saint Peter's, where the park was, I didn't actually know where the entrances were!  We left our B&B that morning, picked up some nibbles at the Trionfale market (cherries, fresh rolls, pecorino, and smoked mozzarella) walked past Saint Peter's, and kept on going uphill for 20-30 minutes in the hot sun. Just when I was worrying that I'd added even more unnecessary stress to our trip by getting us lost in some exurb, we found an entrance.  We parked ourselves on a bench to eat our little picnic, and then Sean napped in the sun while I finished up Innocents Abroad (I've been  on a Twain kick since I got back; I read a short biography, a collection of short stories, and I'm working on the Annotated Huck Finn now).  There was a mom with a little boy near us; he must have had an accident, because later he was running around butt naked with a sweater tied around his waist, and I heard his little playmate asking, "where are your pants?"  They were drying on a bush.  It was cute.