It's been almost a week I know!!

Besides from yesterday and today's on site lectures there hasn't been too much to blog about. Just the usual food shopping and homework, etc etc. So I'll run through yesterday and today's adventures to let you know what I'm doing. First though, I want to share a picture of a random lunch I had last week at a place called Obika. It's a mozzarella bar a few windy side streets north of the pantheon. It's by no means authentic Italian cuisine in the sense of the little mom and pop joints but I really enjoyed my sandwich and took a picture of it so I could try to recreate it at home! I can't remember what it was called on the menu but it's grilled veggies with, of course, mozzarella.



Kate then also got a cafelatte (they are fantastic by the way) and also a great dessert that I wish I took a picture of! It was peaches with some sort of creamy, ice-cream looking like topping. It was complete heaven let me tell you..

Ok so yesterday, January 26h, my Baroque class went to Galleria Doria-Pamphilj located right on Via del Corso which is one of the oldest intact museum since the Baroque era mostly because the Pamphilj family still infact lives there. To live on Via del Corso, by the way, meant you must have been very wealthy because it was the main street in Rome where triumphal processions as well as important visitors would come down the Corso and the wealthy would be in their windows, showing their faces and being recognized as being high ranked in society. The road has been around since the time of Augustus in ancient Rome so it's quite historical.
So the Pamphilj family married into the Doria family, hence the name, and together they collected many beautiful artworks and have very grand looking rooms. One of the rooms was designed after the french style seen in the hall of mirrors of Versailles. We actually weren't suppose to take pictures but since when do I listen?



The outside of the gallery isn't really much to look at, but the garden area inside has lemon and orange trees and was pretty.



Carracci's "Flight into Egypt"



The french styled hallway.

It was a fairly small gallery but it had some Caravaggios and Berninis so I really enjoyed seeing some of their earlier works.

So that was yesterday, today I wen to see two churches - one in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and another a few blocks over called Santa Cecila. Santa Maria is a main piazza in Trastevere and many of the locals believe that area is the true center on Rome and that Piazza Venezia and the Forum and all that is just the political and traditional center. And in many ways it is. A lot of my friends and classmates have gone down there and say it's their favorite area of Rome because tourists don't really gather there, and American students are all in Campo dei Fiori so it's been nice to walk through the area and see what people mean.



This is the church in the Santa Maria piazza area. It's squished between two buildings and has a bell tower that was added in the 12th century maybe and then soon after the front was put on with the statues so it's not like it was originally but the inside is very beautiful.



The columns are originals from ancient Rome. Many of them were taken from the Temple of Isis. There are different capital styles ontop of the columns, the width of them differ, and even the height. The people at the time had to use their own mathematical equations to make each column completely the same in height or if they'd be off even by a millimeter the whole thing would have fallen down by now. And the building has survived earthquakes and nearly 1,000 years of civilization building up around it so clearly they knew what they were doing.







This is Saint Anthony. People write to him and leave their paper on his statue. There's also a big pile on the floor. Oh and that's my Renaissance Professor on the left. He's the one from England and probably my favorite professor this semester.

Next we went over the Santa Cecila. Cecila was a Christian back when Christianity was illegal and she was tortured and killed for her beliefs. This church was built in her honor for her martyrdom. The church, for the jubilee of the coming year 2000, wanted to dig up some of their sacred pieces they had underneath the church and kind of spruce up the place for the big celebration. In doing so they came across a mummified body of a woman who was perfectly preserved. Cecila was killed by having her neck slashed on the side, this mummy also showed a deep slash on her neck. Now keep in mind Christianity wasn't legalized until the rein of Constantine in 313 AD. She's an OLD mummy. And she still had her skin and fingers and hair. The church immediately had a sculpture make a replica of exactly how she was found and it now sits under the alter in the church, and they gave Cecila another burial underneath the replica. It's a very fascinating story and the sculpture is very well done, kinda of creepy in a way when you see he slash mark sculpted into the neck. I couldn't get very good pictures of it.







So that's it for now! I ave to run and get ready for my Byzantine class but I hope you enjoyed the little update! Sorry this was so brief!!

A domani, si? Ciao!