Oh, my aching feet.

Ms. Packratty overdid it Tuesday in a big way. First off, she walked around the neighborhood after breakfast until it was time for the Barberini Museum to open. She took the bus from the corner of Via Urbana and Via Panisperna to Via del Tritone and then hiked to the Barberini. OK, she had an art overdose and is seriously cranky at the fact that the bookstore did not have a single volume overview of the collection. She thinks she could happily visit it every month for a year without it all soaking in.
From the Barberini, she walked over in the direction of the Pantheon, stopping for an espresso doppio at Tazzo de Oro. The Pantheon was very crowded and people had to be reminded (!) that it is a church and that they shouldn’t be eating, drinking and yakking on their cell phones. Once again, the Japanese and the Germans won hands down for rudeness. From the Pantheon, Ms. Packratty snared a cab and took it across the Tiber to Santa Maria de Trastevere, one of the basilica churches of Rome. It was very gaudy and jammed with tourists and not terribly serene.
From there, Ms. Packratty consulted the map and crossed over to St. Cecelia’s. She arrived while the church was closed so that the Cistercian nuns could sing their afternoon office and it was hauntingly beautiful to sit outside and knit while waiting for the service to be complete. Apparently knitting is strictly an old lady thing in Rome because everywhere that Ms. Packratty has KIPed (KIP being Knitted In Public) she has been asked what she is doing and then why. Interesting to try to explain to a fashionable Roman that Ms. Packratty knits because it is good for her and produces something unique, because it appears that the fashionable Roman woman wants nothing so much as to have exactly the same name brands on body and feet as every other fashionable Roman woman. Making an effort to be unique seems to frighten them. But then, looking at the tatty and or cheap hats and scarves they are wearing in the winter cold is enough to convince Ms. Packratty that they really need to take up knitting here in a big way.
Santa Cecelia was a beautiful church – austere compared to Santa Maria. Interestingly, there were quartered pomegranates in bronze scattered around the church – a curiously pagan motif given the piety of the patron saint. Once the church service was over and the nuns - almost all elderly – had filed away to their adjoining cloisters, Ms. Packratty purchased admission to the excavations under the church, which included a very old chapel that looked almost Byzantine in its décor, as well as what appeared to be the remains of a residence.
From St. Cecelia, she walked down to the Tiber and risked life and limb crossing the road that runs along the western bank, then crossed over below the Isola Tiburtina, where the city’s largest maternity hospital is located. Then she caught the bus back to the Barberini Metro stop and walked up the very long hill to Santa Susanna, where she picked up her ticket for the papal audience on Wednesday morning. Then she splurged on another cab because her feet were about to drop off at the ankles and returned safely to Via Urbana centi venti tre, where she nipped into the salumeria and bought some prosciutto and then to Panificio Monti for a couple of slices of rustic bread. A bit of provolone dolce added to the prosciutto and bread and a glass of a really pleasant Montepulciano d’Abruzzo made for dinner.

One observation – Romans must be the world’s most frustrated gardeners. There are plants, including olive and citrus trees, growing on the most improbable balconies and terraces and, at this season, pots of cyclamens blooming everywhere. It definitely serves to soften what could otherwise be far too hard a cityscape. The Roman preference for shades of ochre is apparently persistent across the millennia – the same shades seen on modern buildings around the city is seen in the excavations under the Vatican on the tombs buried since the third century AD.
Ms. Packratty has even found a television channel that transcends language – the pet channel. Last night as she was reading, there was a lengthy program devoted to the piccolo (small) terriers. Europeans no longer dock the tails of the various breeds and it was surprising to see how flimsy the tails of some of the terrier breeds look. Apparently Italians like the same things about terriers as Americans, because the narrator was clearly extolling their courage and pugnacity as well as their energy and happy dispositions.

Wednesday, there is the aforementioned papal audience and then Ms. Packratty plans to go to the Borghese Gallery and possibly follow up with taking the 118 bus down the Via Appia. It is hard to believe she has been here not quite a week – it feels as though she could happily spend the next decade getting to know this city and taking in all of the art and architecture. Sadly, she has not won the lottery and will just have to return home and start saving her pennies again.