Day 18 Rome, Italy

Sometimes I love the convenience of Blogtorch for writing my blog and other times I despise it. We just had a busy fulfilling day in Rome that I summarized beautifully - spending about an hour crafting it - and I was about to publish it to find that the post just disappeared. So now I am tired annoyed and don’t want to write anything and go to bed. But I will summarize some of the hilights again. 

We had a wonderful experience attending mass at the Pantheon this morning. 10:30 am on Sundays - if you have a chance to attend mass at the Pantheon in person, do it. 

The Pantheon empty of tourists after the mass. You need to commit about an hour of your time to sit and be present and not leave during mass. What a wonderful way to experience a 2,000 year old temple. It started out as a pagan temple. Then around 615 AD Pope Boniface the IV made it a Christian church. 

When we emerged from the Pantheon we had a throng of people waiting to get in. Museums in Rome are free the first Sunday of the month  so perhaps that contributed to the line up outside. 

We then went to the site where Julius Caesar was stabbed by his conspirators. 

Then it was hot and we wanted to return to our apartment for lunch and air conditioning. We then had a siesta!

At 5:30 pm JP ME and I went walking to a saint S’anselmo where we heard Gregorian chanting during a vespers service. Walking their we saw amazing stuff!!

ME and JP stood in line to look through the keyhole to see the basilica in the distance. I chose to recharge by sitting under the trees and making a couple of calls home. 

Vittorio Emmanuel monument.

Then we kindly had the wonderful Hotel S’anselmo staff call us a cab back to our apartment. That looked like a glorious hotel!!

Good night.