It was N's turn to sleep poorly, and it didn't help that A woke her up after a nightmare. For my part, I was up at five, and lay on the couch and quietly read guidebooks. It was raining, though lightly and intermittently, and it seemed quite cool. I formulated a plan to head out to a museum first thing, but needed the cooperation of everyone else. Z did get up around seven, had a few cherries and some bread with jam, and snuggled with me. Then I dozed off again. Somewhere in there, N awoke, saw me asleep, and went back to bed again. Eventually everyone got up and was fed, but it was nearly eleven.
We walked across the Ponte Mazzini and up to the main busy street cutting east-west across the centro storico, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. On the way I stopped in at a tabacchi and bought some bus tickets, and we used them to board a number 64 heading for Stazione Termini. N and I stood; the kids got seats as people left. We swung past Piazza Venezia (getting a good look at the Roman insula, or apartment block, just to the left of the staircases up the Campidoglio, which we had forgotten to look for the day before) and up Via Nazionale to Termini.
We were there to arrange our train tickets to Naples; there were big lines at the biglietteria, but N found machines with touch screens that "spoke" English and took cash. We found a train that was nonstop and on which we could reserve seats, and fed our bills into the slot to get our ticket.
It was lunchtime; we walked a bit east (a less gray neighbourhood than I remembered from 82; either they had spruced it up, or I stayed more to the west of the station) to an Eritrean restaurant called Africa. There, for a change, we had a communal platter of injera on which were heaped servings of doro wat (chicken stew), zighini (lamb), and a selection of vegetarian dishes. Tasty, if messy.
It continued to be grey and cool, and occasionally drizzled lightly as we walked back to Termini and into the Palazzo Massimo across the street, which houses the newly-renovated Museo Nazionale Romano. This collection used to be housed in the Baths of Diocletian, sizeable remnants of which still stand opposite Termini, until it was deemed unsafe and the collection went into storage pending renovation of a new site.
The work was clearly effective: pieces were well-labelled, and neither too sparse nor crammed in. There were even small posters at kid height on certain pieces, though in Italian (N heroically volunteered to translate). The ground floor had mostly statuary, of various emperors plus copies of Greek originals; we were admitted at a preset time to the second floor, which had some nice frescoes from classical buildings, such as the "House of Livia" works excavated near the Villa Farnesina, and others showing evocative city and pastoral scenes, including horses and riders that obviously inspired Picasso's sketch of Don Quixote. I found the cityscapes most fascinating, though it was difficult to tell if they were intended generically, as fantasy, or as accurate depictions of specific locales.
Unfortunately, the preset time meant we were grouped with other people, who were perfectly happy to take up key viewing space while looking at the guide giving us brief commentary in Italian and fractured English, or while reading wall texts. We squeezed around them as best we could, and kept getting shooed along by the museum guard bringing up the rear.
After our "tour", we went down to the first floor, with more statues, including two different copies of the Discobolus, and more emperors, of which the cruel, frowning Caracalla was the most striking. The basement contained a coin collection with electrically-controlled magnifying glasses, a good idea, but lacking in execution and a considerable distraction for the children.
Out again into the busy traffic around Termini, with the skies still grey. We walked around the Repubblica traffic circle (which traces the outline of the exhedra of the Baths of Diocletian) and down the busy Via Nazionale. I asked A which she preferred, wide streets with sidewalk but lots of exhaust-generating traffic, or narrow streets where one had to continually dodge scooters and cars, and she winced.
We turned right at the Via delle Quattro Fontane, which had even narrower sidewalks; the celebrated fountains were (you can't tell such things from a flat map) on four corners of the intersection of two very busy and narrow streets, so it was nearly impossible to pay much attention to them.
This was the high point of the Quirinale hill, or as close as we were going to get to it, and from here we moved down to Piazza Barberini, with its nautical fountain oddly placed in a barren triangular plaza around which traffic seethed. Then down Via del Tritone, in search of what everyone describes as the best gelato in Rome, at Il Gelato di San Crispino. Unfortunately, I had chosen its day of closure. The kids were most disappointed, and I had to promise them a brief trip to the next nearest recommended gelato place, Caffe Giolitti.
This trek took us past the Trevi fountain, also newly scrubbed for the Jubilee year ("a little too fancy for me, Daddy," Z confessed as we walked around the hordes of tourists), past the Column of Marcus Aurelius (even from a distance one could tell that the carvings were in deeper relief than the Column of Trajan, but not as well done), across the Piazza di Montecitorio (with a heavy police presence, since this is the Italian Parliament) and its obelisk, and a little further west to Giolitti.
The cafe was crowded with tourists, even the takeout side. I paid at the cassa, and we all had combinations of mostly non-fruit flavours such as cioccolato, nocciola, caffe, and straciatella. It was decent but not exceptional, and the kids found the crush somewhat disconcerting.
It was raining, though still not heavily, as we stepped outside. N thought it might be nice to see the Pantheon in the rain, so we made our way there. "Again?" asked A. "You have to admit this is a cool building," I said, as we emerged into the plaza. She admitted no such thing. The floor inside beneath the oculus was roped off, and one could see the drizzle descending, though most of the people inside seemed to be treating it as a free shelter.
We continued south, past Bernini's elephant supporting a small obelisk in Piazza della Minerva, then to the right and down Via del Gesu to the eponymous church. We hadn't brought knee or shoulder coverings, but there was no sign of anyone official, and we sat in the last row of seats in the nave, letting the kids read while we looked at guidebooks. The ceiling frescoes in the nave, which spill over the sides of the oval space and even explode into three-dimensional sculpture at the altar end, were definitely over the top.
The rain let up after a while, and we continued north down the Via delle Pie de Marmo, named after the marble foot statue-fragment partway along, and then up to Sant'Ignazio. The frescoes in the nave used trompe l'oeil perspective, while the flat ceiling of the crossing was painted to simulate a cupola with sun rays streaming in through nonexistent windows. I figured out the places on the central axis where the perspective made sense (conveniently marked by stars, as it turned out), paid L.500 for illumination, and showed the kids how each of the three (including the altar) frescoes only made sense from one point, and were seriously distorted from others.
From there we walked up to see the columns of the Temple of Hadrian, embedded in the side of the Stock Exchange. It was about seven; we had a choice of waiting around for a half-hour or more and eating in the centre, or going home and eating in Trastevere. The kids didn't want to do either, so we choose the latter.
In the evening we went to Romolo nel Giardino della Fornarina, reputedly the home of Raphael's mistress La Fornarina while he was painting the frescoes at the Villa Farnesina. This had a really atmospheric interior garden in which we dined, but it was pretty touristy, and the food was decent without being special. We had spaghetti alle vongole veraci to start, and then various seafood preparations: sogliola alla griglia for A and Z, orata for N, and seppioline for me. The half-bottle of Frascati Superiore was a good accompaniment, though it wouldn't have been anything special on its own.