Halloween weekend in Rome

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Tuesday (28/10)

Today my Roman Catholicism class went on quite the pilgrimage, visiting eight different churches. We saw many famous landmarks of Rome, such as the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the middle of Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, which itself is a church.

One particular church we visited was the Basilica of Sant' Agostino. This church is home to the tomb of St Augustine's mother, St. Monica. She was very well known for caring about the well being of her son, physically and spiritually, so it seemed to be appropriate for me to pray in gratitude for my worrying parents back home, who miss me dearly, and to hope that they find some peacefulness during my time abroad. I also know that my relatives and the parents of my good friends care about my well being, so I prayed for them and their concern over me and their own children.

Another church, which was creepy and disturbing, was Santa Maria Maddalena. Here I was awestruck by the reliquary of Saint Camillus. The very realistic statue of the saint, laying over his own tomb, was a bit off-putting. Then I realized that virtually his entire skeleton was visible just below the statue. This unexpectedly revealing tomb definitely freaked me out, but I did find it to be a quite fitting, as his religious order was dedicated to the study of medicine, so having his anatomy on display seemed to make sense. Still creepy though.



Thursday (30/10)

This Thursday was a mostly ordinary day of class (only Italian). The cafeteria began serving these weird green fruits. We weren't too sure what they were, but I asked one of the SLAs who I saw eating one, and he found out from a cafeteria worker that it's called a mapo, an italian fruit that's a mix between a mandarin and a grapefruit. It's green and smooth on the outside but looks like an orange on the inside and has the taste of a bitter orange. Quite strange but very good.

Also, that evening there was a presentation by the Pontifical Swiss Guard to take about their duties and daily life. It was rather informative. I learned that they have a their own band, and a soccer team that competes in a Vatican championship. The halberds that they hold when are guard are just for decoration, they aren't trained to use them. They have hidden guns on them that they would use should the situation call for it. I also found out that they get paid minimum wage and are only comped for their room. They have to pay for cleaning and all their meals, which seems ridiculous.

When I returned to my room, Sean and I had planned on order pizza. There was one place we thought delivered because we saw other people order it, but according to online, they didn't deliver to our area, so we ordered from some random place that did. We tried getting amatriciana pizzas and an order of croquettes. The delivery guy however brought us two pastas and an order of fried rice balls. He must have grabbed the wrong order, but we didn't make a fuss and just ate it, assuming there was some mistake on our part, but I'm pretty confident now that he simply grabbed the wrong order.



Friday (31/10)

As it was Halloween and we were staying in Rome for the weekend, I tried to find some places to explore that would be fitting for the holiday. So after lunch we left campus to first head to the little purgatory museum, but sadly it was closed at that time and so we came back later when it reopened. Our next visit was to the "monster house" near the Spanish Steps. It was just small house that had monster sculptures around the door frame and the windows, nothing too extreme but it was a bit interesting to see.

And now onto the weirdest destination of the day: the Capuchin crypts. It was a bit pricey (six euro) to enter the museum and the crypts, but I think it was worth it. The museum gave a little bit of back story behind the Capuchin monks and their Franciscan order. The crypts were the real attraction: over 3,00 monks and friars are buried there, organized by some unknown "artist" into an elaborate display of bones. There are five separate rooms with bones strewn about with different themes, such as the crypt of pelvises, the crypt of shin and thigh bones, and the crypt of resurrection, which centers around a painting of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life. Sean's girlfriend was entirely freaked out (she had nightmares about them that night). Some of the skeletons were posed standing up in monk robes. But what I found quite peculiar was that, although the majority were typical skulls, some of the faces on the monks appeared to be preserved in some form, leaving them as some blank featureless flesh. Very odd indeed. It reminded me a bit of Slenderman, which was also on our agenda for the evening.

After the crypts, we hung around Piazza del Popolo which we had not yet been to yet. I scaled some stairs to the top of the hill overlooking the square in order to get a good look. It was such an amazing view, being able to see a clear view of the distant Victor Emmanuel Monument. Truly spectacular. Once the purgatory museum reopened, we walked back there to check it out. It was a free museum and was simply a small room inside of a church, which was quite creepy in itself as it was very dimly lit. The room had the marked objects inside a glass case along a wall. The various objects, such as clothes, books, pictures of tables, each had some sort of connection to a spirit from purgatory. The most common mark was finger and hand prints burned into the clothing of the spirits' siblings, who claim that they appeared before them to warn of their lack of piety in their life, leading them to be trapped in purgatory. Seems rather interesting, but it's hard to believe that the marks couldn't have been made without supernatural means.

Becoming a bit of a tradition, I play the brief computer game of Slenderman, where the player scours a dark forest looking for notes while trying to avoid being capture by the faceless figure known as Slenderman. I always let myself get quite involved in the theatricality of the game to the point where it legitimately frightens me, to the enjoyment of anyone who watches me play. I played through twice, and making it quite far in the second play through, I panicked when I saw Slenderman, shrieking and throwing myself to the floor. Sean and his girlfriend had a good laugh about it. To top of our Halloween night, we intended on watching The Conjuring, but Sean's girlfriend freaked out too much during the first 10 minutes, so we switched to the terrible movie called Drag Me To Hell. Just awful, but quite comical in some parts. And then we finished up with a classic: Ghostbusters. It was definitely a successful Halloween staying in Rome.



Saturday (1/11)

Having a lazy Saturday but still determined to discover a bit more of Rome, I decided to explore Trionfale Market, a large shopping area with many different local vendors, after lunch. Sean's girlfriend came with because she knew of a place that sold good bread there, but Sean stayed behind to get some work down. Sadly, we arrived a half hour before the shops were supposed to close, and with it being the All Saint's Day, most of the shops were already closed, including the one Angelina wanted to get some bread from. I did happen to get some dried pineapple and dried bananas from a vendor. Still being rather early in the afternoon, I wanted to venture a bit northeast to Piazza Mazzini, a close square that I had not yet seen. It was quite a nice piazza, with a somewhat elaborate fountain in the center, but it appeared to be unkempt for quite some time and was certainly in need of some repairs. I definitely saw in it the potential to be a beautiful fountain, just needs a bit of work. It was a rather relaxing day.



Sunday (2/11)

After lunch I told Sean my plan to visit the Villa Burghese gardens, and he decided to join me, along with his girlfriend. It is quite a large park area near the center of Rome, but I had not seen any of it yet and thought that a Sunday afternoon would be perfect. We took our time strolling through the beautiful park. It was just so spectacular. And even some of the trees here are changing color, so it actually did feel a bit like fall. Sean happened to find a note in a hole in a tree, written by some British girls just a week before, which I thought was pretty neat. And then near the zoo that sits right next to the park, we found a strange tree. It had a very large hole at the top, and a smaller one near the bottom of the trunk. We realized that it was completely hollow, and figuring that I could fit through the bottom hole, I climbed inside to explore. It smelled terrible like cigarettes, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. We leisurely walked through the park, stopping to enjoy nature, and found the large lake in the north part of the park. In the middle sat a small elaborate 19th century temple, built purely for a landscape feature. Here we found a great deal of animals, such as a huge catfish, at least a foot and a half in size, a swimming turtle, and a multitude of ducks. We were excited to rent a rowboat, to traverse the lake, but it cost six euro per a person for 20 minutes, which we found to be too absurd, so we just enjoyed the view of the lake. After spending the better part of our day in the wonderful Villa Borghese gardens, I had really grown a much better appreciation for Rome, which I seem to so easily find for the other places I travel to. But this will just make it so much harder to leave in December.

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