Included is a candid shot of a common sight in my area of Italy: the Roman villa. As you can see, many people have vineyards, but perhaps more surprisingly, palm trees are very common in this area as well. The wall is crumbling, there is wet wash hanging on a line. This is the Rome not seen in the guidebooks, but I've been seeing a lot of it firsthand!
For a European city, Roma is comparitively dirty. They don't seem to have a trash-collector's union/guild like in Germany or Switzerland. Most of the apartment building are smoke-shadowed and aging, but painted pleasing pastel colors. There is the constand threat of pick-pocketing on the metro and around large tourist attractions; violent crime is rare in Rome but petty theft is rampant. I was almost attacked by gypsies on the Spanish Steps! I was with a friend at the time, which was lucky because I had no idea what was happening until it was all over, but he was aware and ready for anything. Apparently two of them converged behind us as we began our descent down the Steps, but I began to run down the Steps quite fast just for fun, and apparently they did not want to draw attention to themselves by following us. Lucky! They have quite developed strategies for robbing, involving children or pretending to sell something. Supposedly the best way is to utterly refuse to let them touch you, and not to allow them to move behind you and slash your backpack. I haven't had any trouble, but I am cautious when I am in crowds!
I saw some very interesting things when I ventured into Rome a second time: I especially enjoyed the Capuchin Crypt, or "Bone Church" located on the Via Veneto. The church above the crypt is a functioning one, but I merely visted the rooms below, which was packed with the remains of hundreds of monks. Chandeliers of clavicles! Stacks of skulls! There were tiny half-mummified monks reclining in their moldering robes in alcoves and a chilling inscription at the finish, "What you are, we used to be. What we are, you will be."
After the Capuchin monks I visited the Spanish Steps (anticlimactic) and afterward the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, which is the house where Keats breathed his last and which has been subsequently converted into a museum housing a great deal of memorabilia. Byron and Wordsworth were also honored, but to a lesser extent. The house itself was a darling little dose of Victorian quaintness, with creaking wood floors, heavy drapery and the smell of books. They had quite a few of Percy and Mary Shelley's personal correspondence, perhaps the most poignant of which was a letter from Percy Shelley to a medical friend requesting a lethal dose of prussic acid (a derivative of cyanide that was a popular mehod of suicide at the time) not to take immediately--he assured the friend--but merely for the comfort of holding "the key to the chamber of perpetual rest". The room in which Keats died from tuberculosis was tiny and narrow, with a rusty red tiled floor and sea-green walls. The Memorial House possessed both a death and life mask of Keats, and from those I have quite a good sense of what he looked like...far better than from a formal portrait or an etching. There is also a revealing little sketch done by the one friend in attendance on Keats around 2am the night before the poet died the next morning. The sketchis titled "2 o'clock, done by candlelight to keep me awake," and depicts Keats' blank face and sweat-curling hair as his head rests on his pillow.
Quite interesting.
So. On a recent whirlwind trip to Greece, I visited the ancient sites of Olympia, Corinth, Epidaurus and Delphi and well as the capital city of Athens. The above is a photograph taken among the ruins of Delphi. This ancient place is located on the side of some mountains by the sea and is quite extraordinary. I visited all that was left of several ancient temples to the godesses Hera and Gaia which stand perhaps a quarter mile below Delphi, and then stopped by the waterfall in which pilgrims would purify themselves in antiquity before I finished at the temple of Apollo and the seat of the oracle.
After the visit to the chruch of Santa Croce, three friends and I decided to walk from Rome back to campus along the Via Appia Antica, more commonly known as the Old Appian Way. I do not know how long the section of the road was that we walked, but it takes 30 minutes to cover the same distance by bus on the parallel Appia Nuova. We started out on a radiant Saturday afternoon, and two things became apparent after several hours of brisk walking. 1) The shoes I was wearing had inadequate arch support and 2) I had made the mistake of attempting this feat with three guys as my walking companions, two of whom stand over six feet tall and have considerably longer legs than I do. Take a break? Of course, if you have to. Walk slowly? Of course, if you need to. Needless to say, we didn't do much of either. ;)
What does one do on a sunny Saturday morning in Rome? Go to see some relics! Yesterday I went with a friend to tour the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, which is (ostensibly) a lovely 17th-century church, but is actually a church established by St. Helena and paid for by her son, the emperor Constantine the Great. A lovely early medieval boudoir that was used by the dowager empress has been converted into a chapel at the back of the church. In fact, there is a whole rabbit warren of miraculous rooms in the back that house relics and where popes have had visions. One of the most amazing rooms is, of course, the place where this photograph was taken. In the glass case pictured here there is quite a sacred collection. On the top shelf to the right are two thorns from the crown of thorns, to the left of those are some fragments of the pillar to which Christ was tied and scourged, beside them is a piece of Doubting Thomas' finger. In pride of place on the second shelf are pieces of the actual cross within the golden cross. (There used to be a much larger bit of the cross--brought back from Jerusalem by St. Helena--at Santa Croce, but it has recently been removed to the Vatican.) Under that on the left is a nail, one of THE nails and beside that on the bottom right is the identifying inscription nailed over Christ's head on the cross. 
From Napoli I traveled on to Stabiae, which is situated on the Mediterranean...on the coast of the Bay of Naples, to be exact. The above is the view from my room in the hostel. This little town is quite enjoyable, but not for the faint of heart: it has an adequate little downtown district on the beach, but this could only accessed by a 15 minute walk through a narrow, rat-maze of a ghetto. I would never have attempted it by myself, but with ten friends walking around me the journey was interesting rather than dangerous. The inhabitants looked amazed to see tourists! By the time we reached downtown, it was almost dark, but I still enjoyed myself: there was a narrow jumble of huge, black rocks curving out into the bay and one adventurous friend and I hopped and jumped our way to the very farthest point. That moment--standing on a little rock perhaps two feet square, lapped by the darkening Mediterranean just as the sun set--is perhaps one of the best of the trip so far! Afterwards we explored the mainstreet, were adopted by one of the many stray dogs of the city and enjoyed gelato before heading back to the hostel.
This fountain stands in front of the Temple of Hercules on the Aventine hill. The temple dates from around 200 B.C. I have no idea when this fountain was constructed or what is depicts but the fountains here are my weakness! It was evening by the time I snapped this picture, but the ambient light illuminated this enough, I think.
