Roaming around Rome

I started out today like I have for the rest of the week: with a trip to the grocery store. This is a fairly Roman thing to do, though, because they tend to buy each day's food fresh. Our refrigerator is small--we can't buy an entire month's worth of food like we do in the States. Plus there are no shopping carts at the grocery store, only baskets, so we are limited in how much we can buy each time. I'm just glad the store is so close to us--we only have to walk down to the end of our block and down the street a little way.

The thing about Rome though, once you start walking everything seems close. Maybe just because you never have far to go until you run into another historic monument (or the ruins of a monument).

Today Shannon and I decided to go out walking and see where we ended up. We walk through Trastevere all the time, so instead we went the other way, across the river to the south part of Rome. We walked around the Aventine Hill and over towards the Palatine Hill. I still can't get over reading about these places for my history class and then being able to just go out and see them.

Walking back towards Trastevere we found the Pyramid of Cestius (yep, there's a pyramid in Rome). Turns out this pyramid was built outside the city since it's a tomb and they were forbidden in the city walls, but Rome grew so much that eventually the pyramid became a part of the construction of the Aurelian wall. Now it's next to the southern gate of Porta San Paulo.

After that, we walked towards school and decided to continue up to the Vatican. I know, I know, I've been in Rome nearly three weeks so I should have seen the Vatican already. I finally made it, and we're going back tomorrow morning to actually go inside. Today we just took pictures outside and stood in awe of how huge St. Peter's Square is.

And then we finally made it back to our apartment. We walked over 3 hours and covered a pretty sizable chunk of Rome, but it felt good.