Rome Day 2

I have so many pictures, it's ridiculous!!!!! Here, let me show you!

                                                      Look! It's a street! In Rome!!

                                                  Sant'Agnese in Agone - it's Baroque!

                                                   Wedding pictures in Piazza Navona!

Now onto what I actually did today.

The first thing was that our tour guide, Professor Duclaux, realized it was a national holiday, and therefore almost everything was closed. Everything. I mean, it is Independence Day basically, so it's understandable, but everything that was planned had to be changed. So instead we kind of just walked around Rome during the morning and did our own thing in the afternoon.

First we revisited the Campo dei Fiori and Piazza Navona and talked about the cool stuff there, but afterwards we visited the Jewish ghetto of Rome, which was incredibly cool.

Some interesting facts:

• The word 'ghetto' comes from the Venetian dialect and their word for smelting, which was 'gietto'. When Jews first started coming to Italy, they went to Venice and were only allowed to settle on a certain island, the one that was designated for smelting iron. The Jewish language has no soft g sound (like a j in English) and thus pronounced it as 'ghetto'.
• In the 1980's, the Jewish Synagogue was the victim to terrorist attacks. You can still see the bullet holes in the wall of the building, and because of the attacks, there is a heavy police presence in that area.

                                     Here's a picture of the Synagogue. It's gorgeous, right?

          Oh, and we saw that old man that was actually a sewer in Ancient Rome. So there's that.

After all this mess (Oh, and we crossed a bridge at some point, but that's not as important), we were allowed to disperse and do our own thing. So Elizabeth, Melinda, and I (I'll put pictures of them up here at some point) decided to revisit all those places we visited yesterday and take pictures. It was kind of like drive-by tourism. Look at the pretty pictures!!!

                                          Pantheon! Mind-blowing feat of architecture

                                                   Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

                                                         La Fontana di Trevi!

I had tortellini for lunch and pizza for dinner (this will be a theme (the pizza, not the tortellini)) and gelato for dessert...Honestly, there's already been a lot of gelato. It's so good!

Interesting Stories of the Day:

• As we were walking through the Piazza Navona with our ice cream, a man started trying to sell us stuff. We didn't stop or look at him. He proceeded to yell this. "Women! Women! You with the ice cream!!! Ai yai yai!!" It was very entertaining.
• There is the Basilica Sant' Andreas della Valle right next door, and we went to check what time their masses were so that I could go to church on Sunday. We just happened to walk in during the ordination of new priests. So that was fun.
• Throughout the day we had seen tons of nuns and priests, and I decided to go to confession while I was here. Unfortunately, most of the churches are closed past a certain time and I had no churches nearby to do confession at. Therefore, I walked outside my hotel, waited for a priest to walk by, and then did a drive-by confession. He did the absolution in French because that was the only language he knew it in. Which was awesome.

So that's it for today. Get ready for Roma Day 3. A domani!