Catching up - Italy trip

I'm continuing to catch up my blog by writing about my trip to Italy from last June.

Day three:

We started the day at a round, originally Pagan, church named San Sebastiano.


This is a model (of something), and there are chairs in case you'd like to sit by it.

If you look closely, you can see that the painting includes a handy key - they've labeled all of the different gruesome deaths with letters that correspond to the descriptions below.

Flowers outside San Sebastiano

Then we went to the Villa Celimontana. I loved the orange trees and the water fountains that looked like wolf heads (which I drank from but didn't get a picture of).

After that, we went to the "church with the layers" (aka Basilica San Clemente) which, to steal some info from a Fodor's Travel review, is a "12th-century church [that] was built on top of a 4th-century church, which in turn was built over a 2nd-century pagan temple to the god Mithras and 1st-century Roman apartments" (Fodor's Travel).

It was so amazing to go from one church down into another and down into another - and to think that rather than eroding with time (which is what I generally think time does), Rome just keeps getting more and more built up.

If I was picking, I'd say this is THE church to go to. It combines the regular church-y stuff (frescoes, religious art, beautiful tiled floors) with underground exploration and getting to feel (a little bit) like Indiana Jones. Seriously, it can't be beat.

My photographs don't do it justice - it's very, very cool.

Then, we spent some more time underground. 

For lunch, we had a prix fixe meal at L'Asino d'Oro, which serves Umbrian food - so delicious. We also stopped in a few shops in the neighborhood.

Next, we took a train to Ostia Antica. If you'd like to be surrounded by ruins (rather than people - especially people trying to sell you stuff), and if you'd like to feel (somewhat) like Indiana Jones (again), Ostia Antica is IT. We were there for hours, saw a handful of other people, and barely got halfway through the place.

Brenna and I also spent a bit of time pretending to be "bogus tour guides" and making up stories about the various buildings, statues, and mosaics.  I'm wishing I could remember the stories (I can't), but I have a feeling that dragons were involved.

They were *serious* about their tiled floors. 

 So many ruins, so few people

More crazy blue sky

This was as far as we got. Ostia Antica is HUGE!

We headed back to Rome and had pizza at Li Rioni for dinner.