ROMA Montage

Flowers in the Campo

Carabinieri, one of the local branches of police. It is very entertaining to watch these guys in their skin-tight uniforms and ray-bans. You can just feel the attitude rolling off...

At the Vatican

Media protest in Piazza Navona

"Fisher of Men" symbol on Santa Maria de Trastevere Church

The floor of Santa Maria de Trastevere--just imagine how long it would take to cut these slices of granite from the columns in order to create this pattern!

Pastries from the forno

Trevi Fountain

Legend has it that tossing 3 coins from your right hand over your left shoulder into the Trevi Fountain ensures a return trip to Rome--2 coins for a divorce, and 1 for marriage. Needless to say, I tossed in 3!

Private Gardens at Palazzo Barberini

Coffee for 25 at La Tasa d'Oro, one of the oldest Roman coffeehouses

We take pictures in the antique mirrors

This woman's life purpose is to feed Rome's pigeons. She rides around the city on her bike with bags full of birdseed, followed by a dark cloud of filthy birds. Very disgusting.

At Cartoleria, a shop near the Pantheon that recently celebrated its 100 year anniversary. They sell a plethora of leather bound journals and exotic writing materials.







By law shops in Rome are only allowed to offer sales and discounts during two periods of the year. I was fortunate enough to be in Rome for the two week long July sale, in which shops have discounts ranging from 20-70% off. The streets have been filled with driven shoppers. Personally, I prefer to shop at local markets, family-owned stores, and second hand shops, so I avoided most of the commercial mayhem, but it has been fascinating to watch the action.





The above street vendor is Nestor. He collects coins and fashions them into exquisite necklaces. He came to Campo de Fiori so that a group of us could see his wares. However, after he set his cardboard stand up in the street, a nearby shop called the Carabinieri, who showed up demanding to see Nestor's permits for street vending. Nestor does not have a permit for the Campo because he usually stays in Trastevere, so he was likely to get fined or worse for setting up in the Campo. Luckily, my fast talking art professor, Lisa, was able to extricate Nestor from the situation, and Nestor moved his station to the UW Rome Center's hallway.

My Ponte Sisto

I took a train to Ponte Galeria, on the outskirts of Rome where I tried to find a detention center for illegal migrants. I walked around for a couple of hours, but was not able to find it.



I found graffiti, though! One piece of graffiti associated the detention center with a state-run concentration camp, which I thought was particularly powerful.






Graffiti marks my way home. Much better than roadsigns, which I tend to forget.

Last visit to Porto Portese market

Marlon Brando spotted!

The Grand Mosque of Rome

The other day we visited Rome's Grand Mosque(the largest in Europe) on the outskirts of the city. What I liked most about being inside the mosque was the feeling of uncluttered space and the use of natural light. Visual representations of God or prophets are not allowed because they can be worshipped as idols. Instead, the mosque was decorated with incredible geometric patterns and little details.

PHOTO DUMP. Street Snapshots and Other Elements

This one is mine!






Look carefully. I might be in this one.

Florence

Snapped a shot of the David while no one was looking!



The Duomo! This church and the attached basilica gave the trip to Florence a whole new meaning. I would have made the trip solely for this. The Dumo itself is huge and awe-inspiring. It's one of those places built for the purpose of making one feel small and insignificant.



My favorite place in Florence by far was at the top of the Duoma basilica. There are 451 stairs to the very top--yes, I counted--and the passageway up is tight, hot, and crowded with people going both up and down, but it was worth the effort. At the top, all of Florence is spread out before you. It was an incredible view, and photos can't even come close to capturing it.

Capitoline Museum and Castel San Angelo

Mythic She-Wolf with Romulus and Remus



View of the Roman Forum from the Capitoline Museum





Ponte San Angelo--we didn't actually get to go into Castel San Angelo because it was closing when we arrived, but someday soon I hope...







"the poet is you, which is lovely"

a note on garbage...

Public garbage collection fascinates me here. The market in the Campo de Fiori produces A LOT of garbage. Instead of requiring vendors to keep track of their own garbage, it is piled up throughout the campo until midday when the market begins to shut down. Then the piles of garbage become mountains. After the vendors have vacated the square the garbage sits for about half an hour before the city's garbage collectors make their rounds. (Apparently garbage collecting is a highly esteemed job. I have seen quite a few girls in their 20s dressed in the red garbage woman's attire.) There are two types of public garbage collectors: those that come in big trucks and those that arrive in tiny go-cart-like vehicles that only have three wheels. Cleaning the Campo takes about an hour, and then the collectors move on.

Now, this isn't that spectacular, since there is a daily market in the Campo it makes sense to make a daily event of garbage collection. But this happens everywhere! There are no garbage cans anywhere on the streets...and everyone walks while they eat, so garbage accumulates in very odd places. It just seems bizarre to me.

Private garbage collection is another matter altogether. It is quite intimidating. I literally have five different garbage cans in my room, each for a specific type of waste: plastics, food and biodegradable waste, etc, etc, etc. Each of these is collected on a different day of the week, and the site where you throw away the trash is monitored by cameras. So I desperately try not to create any sort of garbage at all. If I happened to mess up the system, they would find out about it, and I would be fined 200 euro.



Macho men with fruity gelatto

Piazza Vittorio

Yesterday we went to the market in Piazza Vittorio, Rome's unofficial China town. Strangely, this particular market place felt a lot more like Seattle than anywhere else I have been in Rome. A more diverse group of people frequent the market--the majority being of Eastern origin, and this reminded me of home.
On the way to the market I walked past a long row of Chinese-owned clothing and retail stores that seemed barren and carried a lot of the same products. This is because in 2007 Rome passed a city ordinance that targeted the Chinese business community. The ordinance banned the sale of wholesale products within the city limits, and, since this is how most Chinese shops obtain their products, the shops were turned into mere "showrooms." The wholesale warehouses that contain the actual products for sale have been moved outside the city. Customers place their orders, and the merchandise is then brought into the city.
Piazza Vittorio made me realize how the rest of Rome is not very diverse. The people are by no means homogenous--but there are a lot of white shopowners and tourists throughout the historic district. Piazza Vittorio was clearly not a tourist destination.