![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2017\/08\/DSC06110.jpg\")
<\/a>leaving our ship.\u00a0 Looming high above us were two joined forts, one from 6th<\/sup> century Gothic wars, the other constructed under the Bourbons. Today, it serves as part of the Italian Navy\u2019s training facility, but it\u2019s a reminder of the conflict that marked the Italian peninsula after the end of the Pax Romana.\u00a0 (Gaeta was, unti<\/a>l recently, the home of the US Sixth fleet, the latest in the line of defenders; the fleet has moved to Naples).<\/p>\nCarolyn wondered why Gaeta was not in the Lonely Planet.\u00a0 I pointed out that the guidebook was already 900 pages (thank you Wikipedia; ouch, I did say that?).<\/p>\n
The road continued along the coast, with ruins of other towers that once withstood invaders. Today, they withstand hordes of tourists going to the beach in August, a month European workers basically take off.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been here once before, so I tried to see different things.\u00a0 Our hotel is near the ancient walls\u2014and the Borghese park.\u00a0 The museum in the park is listed as \u201cthe one art museum\u201d to see, and I\u2019m off in an hour or so to pick up my reserved tickets (Rome has 4 million people and I think 8 million tourists).<\/p>\n It was really spectacular, both the contents and the building.\u00a0 Cardinal The grounds constitute the biggest public park in Rome, and I went back later to another museum, dedicated to a late 19th<\/sup>-early 20th<\/sup> century sculptor who had aristocratic clients.\u00a0 One client was Atat\u00fcrk, and the artist\u2019s renditions of the great leader of Turkey are in Ankara. Another was Grand Duke Nicholas, whose statues were delivered to St. Petersburg in 1914, but did not survive the Russian Revolution.<\/p>\n We spent the rest of the afternoon on the on-off bus, mostly on, seeing what we could in the one day we were in Rome.<\/p>\n Otherwise, our day would have been totally ruined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019re ruin-ed August 16, 2017 We saw a (bad) movie, \u201cMy Life in Ruins\u201d on the boat, which was about a tour group in Greece. Our ten days has been about \u201cruins\u201d and yesterday we arrived in the \u201cbiggest open-air museum in the world,\u201d the city of Rome. The day began with ruins.\u00a0 We woke … Continue reading “We’re ruin-ed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malta-and-italy-august-2017"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1633"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8545,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions\/8545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>We stopped at the ruins of a medieval village, which once housed 5000 people and had 14 churches.\u00a0 Only the palace (with a huge tower; our guide said the higher the tower, the more powerful you were thought to be) and the town hall (restored as a summer home for the family that bought it) were in reasonable shape.\u00a0 It\u2019s called Ninfa, in honor of the nymphs who supposedly inhabited the lake. The village is now kind of a nature preserve, with 14 full-time gardeners, and 25% of the property set aside for animals.\u00a0 We saw trees from all over the world, many of which have adapted well to the local climate. Incidentally, the area also grows 30% of the world\u2019s kiwis, a plant we mistook for grape vines.<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>And then there was the grand entrance to Rome, past the arch of Constantine (it was in the battle for Rome that he saw the image of Christ and, at least in the telling, that image led to victory, his conversion to Christianity, and the rest is a different chapter in Rome\u2019s history); the immense neo-classic building of the 1870s celebrating the emergence of the <\/a> <\/a>Italian state; the balcony where il Duce mobilized Italian fascists in the 1930s; the Coliseum; the Forum (where the Republic extended the Greek concept of democracy); and the obelisks brought to celebrate the expansion of Empire.\u00a0 Rome should have a 900-page Lonely Planet, too. And a peek across the Tiber River revealed the dome of St. Peters and the Vatican City. And that was just on the way in!<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>Borghese was the secretary of state for the Papal States (appointed by his uncle, the pope), and used both his money and his power to collect art reflecting the greatness of imperial Rome and its Greek predecessor\u2014and his own times.\u00a0 The power helped; part of his collection came when he threatened its previous owner with jail if he didn\u2019t sell. Fortunately, he liked a lot of the same artists I do: there was a Caravaggio room, paintings by Raphael and Titian, and sculptures by Bernini. The museum was so popular that I had to get reservations yesterday, and had only two hours in the museum.\u00a0 I got there at 8:30, lined up to get my ticket, then lined up for the \u201crush\u201d at 9 a.m.\u00a0 At 10:50, the loudspeaker announced that we were to leave and make way for the next group.<\/p>\n<\/a>Carolyn\u2019s target was the Pantheon, built originally by Hadrian in 120 AD.\u00a0 It was the largest dome in the world until the 16th<\/sup> century, and remains the largest unsupported concrete dome today.\u00a0 Once dedicated to all gods, it became a church in 608 AD and it still is. The 16 Corinthian columns in front are striking\u2014and so were the armed guards, but this is Europe.<\/p>\n