Struggling a bit tonight as we have written nothing during the day. It is almost 11:00 and we just got back from dinner at Il Focolare, a very nice restaurant down the street a bit in Monteverde. We ate a huge meal, drank some great wine......and the walk back to the apartment went very slowly! This has been a great day of exertion! It started out in normal fashion, but on the way back from dinner we passed the 5 mile mark on Fitbit. We have been looking to get into better shape during the trip, but this is stretching things a bit!
Anyway, back to the beginning of the day. We had a nice slow start. Andrea woke up at 7:00, but I didn't make it out of bed until 8:00. We had our normal breakfast and started to get organized for heading down into the city. We made it out by around 10:00.
 |
| They take security seriously here, particularly in the last few years. There is a full-time gatekeeper who 'buzzes' everyone in. You can barely see the gate in the fence photo. The gatehouse is just to the right of the photo. |
 |
| Just to the right of the main building is the secure lot where we park our car. We have a special fob to open the iron gates electronically. Our car is the first one in the line. |
The traffic seemed to be light today (Saturday) and we made it to our planned parking street in about 12 minutes. We did not find the spaces we had used last Saturday, but were lucky one street over. From there it was about 6 blocks to Piazza del Popolo.
Out destination was Via Marguta, which Andrea had always remembered as a nice, slightly quiet street (with lots of art galleries) which linked Piazza del Popolo to the Spanish Steps. Today was actually the day of an art festival, so there were booths lining the street its entire length. That being said, the street was beautiful and the artwork was terrible!
 |
| Saturday crowds heading into Piazza del Popolo |
 |
| This is the craziness of cars, motorbikes and pedestrians that is everyday Rome! |
 |
| Bubble makers are a big deal with the kids in the piazza |
 |
| Rome has more obelisks than all of Egypt! They stole them all! Also, we were totally shocked to see a few clouds today! The first since we arrived in Rome. (They only slightly obscured the sun, then disappeared!) |
...
We negotiated our way through the crowds gathered at the base of the Spanish steps. Quite an influx of tourists, but the azaleas remained quite stunning. We drifted a couple of streets over and window shopped a bit before resting at a caffe and grabbing a coffee.
 |
| Fun to stumble on a photo shoot! Love the car! |
 |
| Had to check out Babington's Tea Room, where we went with the kids years ago to have waffles! |
After that, we headed back to Piazza del Popolo and looked up the church that we heard had two Caravaggio painting......Santa Maria del Popolo. It was not too crowded and the paintings were quite stunning......being nicely lit once you dropped a Euro in the light box!
Back to the apartment for lunch. Today we decided to shift gears and cook pasta for lunch and it turned out to be fantastic. It also sent us to an early siesta to recover! Around 4:00 we both went over to the Studio for a couple of hours.......very relaxing. We also stopped to see our friends Eleanor and Geoffrey, who are leaving first thing tomorrow to go to Norway, and eventually back to Martha's Vineyard. They were very nice to hang out with and we will miss them.
 |
| View from our kitchen and balcony |
Around 7:00 we headed out to the back lawn for our nightly wine 'relax' time, taking a short detour to the 4th floor roof terraces to check out the late afternoon light. It was very nice as usual and we stayed for over an hour. It was the first time that we had noticed two things.......first some small gnats that were emerging as the weather has gotten warmer......and second, a healthy bat population that enjoyed these guys for dinner! The bats were amazing, swooping very close to the ground (and us)! Rather exciting!
 |
| Main living room at the Academy |
 |
| View to the east from the roof terrace |
 |
| View to the north, with our Villa in the foreground |
 |
| The Academy vegetable garden |
As we headed back through the main courtyard we ran into Joe. He was heading down to Eleanor and Geoff's studio to say goodbye......but they had left. We told him that their plan was to eat lightly at the Bar Gianicolo tonight so we headed up to see if they were still there. (we were headed in the same direction for our dinner noted above). Sure enough, they were tucked into the corner of the bar eating dinner......some funny vegetarian pizza. We said a quick hello......then continued our trek to Il Focolare.
The end of the story is that it was an incredible meal. Great pasta and wonderful veal and prosciutto. Any weight loss that we had managed to date was probably lost in one meal!
We are back in the base camp and ready to turn in for the night!
No comments:
Post a Comment