We left Venice at 8 AM on a 8-hour bus ride and reached Rome at 4PM. The ride was made enjoyable by a small detour through the picturesque Chianti area in Tuscany.
Once we reached the hotel, we took a cab and reached the Campidoglio and checked out the Museo Capitolini (Capitol Museum). This is another famous museum with some very important works like the She-wolf bronze (a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus the mythic founders of Rome), Venus, Dying Gaul, Phidias’s Amazon Woman dated to the 5th Century BC. We also saw the gigantic head, foot and hand of Constantine.
The head was 5-times the size of the David statue we had seen in Florence. Probably the Constantine statue would have been 100 feet tall to have a head of that size. Wonder how it would feel to see the entire statue intact. There were also some excellent paintings at the museum by Veronese, Tintoretto, Guercino and other great painters.
They allowed us to take pictures of the paintings in this museum – the only one that we visited where this was posisble. So that was cool.
However, in general, the documentation in this museum was bad, making you wonder whether its an elaborate ruse to make you hire guides or buy their books. All the same, considering that its a very important museum, I hope they improve the documentation before our next visit.
Then we walked to the Fontane de Trevi (Trevi Fountain). Its called Trevi because 3 streets converged onto the fountain in the olden days. Now, 6 streets are converging. This is a spectacular fountain made by another famous artist – Salvi. It has the God Neptune astride his chariot at the top and water flowing in all directions with many mythical and real animals below the God. Its a huge fountain – the mother of all fountains. As is customary, I swung a coin into the fountain for good luck. The visit to the fountain was a fitting finale to our Italy trip.
We then had a quick dinner at one of the restaurants and made our way back to our hotel. We got up early in the morning the next day and reached the US in the afternoon. The customs counter on the exit in Rome was a nightmare – multiple queues were converging on the same official, there were too few officials and many of the officials were yelling something in Italian! On the whole it was a fish market or a zoo – not something in a place like Rome where so many tourists come and spend their hard-earned money. On the whole, this turned out to be another unforgettable trip.
Arrivederci Roma! (as they say in Rome).
P.S.
1. Ganesh, I saw your comment on the previous entries. I didn’t see it untill today and so I missed the gelateria at the fountain. Too bad. 2. In a moblog, i just email the text to a certain address and the text appears as a blog post. Thats what I did. I did not have web access. If any of the other posters want to use this technique, please let me know.
