I am officially on overload. There is way more stuff coming in than I can practically process and comment on in a timely fashion, so to save my sanity I'm not going to comment on our trip to the Vatican yet. But here's a quick summary of what we did Thursday, which seems and awfully long time ago right now.
Before I get going, I should say that this is the part where jet lag tends to really hit me. Not that I can't get through the day. My best attribute as a traveller is my stamina. Put me someplace interesting and I never get too tired, and though I get very uncomfortable standing in one place for a long time, I seem to be able to walk endlessly. But after getting over the exhaustion from the plane trip I often have several nights where it's very difficult to stay asleep for any extended period of time, which makes me a bit foggy during the day, even if it's hard for others to distinguish it from my general spaciness.
On Thursday we started with a trip to the Synagogue. In most European cities, there's a Jewish quarter we always like to visit. Here, the main synagogue is very close to the hotel, but as we found out there isn't really much of an area to visit.
The only way to see the synagogue is with a tour, and we were lead by this tiny old woman who spoke good but heavily accented English. The one thing she made abundantly clear on several occasions is that there have been Jews in Rome since the 2nd century BCE. This accorded them a special status, and the ghettoization that was standard in most places with a much more short-lived phenomenon in Rome. Because the Roman Jews were here pre-Diaspora, they are very proud to call themselves Roman Jews, not any other kind. There are 13,000 of them and they are Orthodox.
The main synagogue, which we visited, wasn't really anything special to look at. The old one was burned down by someone who got impatient with negotiations about whether or not it should be torn down and/or moved.
We spent the afternoon just walking around and in the evening, after a violent thunderstorm, went to a nice little restaurant near the Trevi Fountain. I had artichokes (mmm) for an appetizer and sea bass Sardinian style. It was a simple preparation, which was probably as much as the Sardines could handle, which was (with a few notable exceptions) boned tableside.
After dinner we went to the fountain, where we sat and watched a steady succession of people get photographed or photograph themselves tossing or more frequently pretending to toss a coin over their shoulder into the fountain. The fountain is huge and to my eye more ornate and impressive than romantic, but it was still quite a spectacle. Here's some pictures.
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