16 August Rome

We had such a fun day today with Bob and Jackie from Vancouver in Canada. It is quite interesting as Bob is a retired Real Estate Agent and Jackie is in Telecommunications like Bill. What an unusual world we live in. They are heading to Civitavecchia to board a Holland-America cruise ship tomorrow for 3 weeks with some friends who arrived today. We decided to spend the day together and see Rome. We used our second 24 hours up on the on/off bus. This time we visited the Pantheon. This was originally a pagan temple, but was later converted into a church in 608AD, which saved the whole building from being recycled for building materials. It is an amazing and imposing building with wonderful paintings and frescoes. It has circular portal in the roof, which is open to the weather. It fortunately has a drain in the floor if there is rain. It has huge bronze doors, which are a good 10 inches thick. It is so well balanced it only takes two people to close the door. Wanted to see the Appian Way today but with it being Sunday the bus stopped running early and of course they don’t tell you this.
Instead we visited a church in Barbarini. Some of the churches here are very troubling. We went into this hall of human bones that was arranged in mosaic form. We thought that maybe the bones had come from some roman massacre. It was the exhumed bones of 4000 Friars, who had been plucked from their graves; their skeletons had been dismembered and made into “creative” patterns. They considered it Holy. I call it desecration of a grave for material gain. They did it to explain “life” Beats me where they get a meaning like that.
The 4 of us had dinner at Brancaleone, a local Roman restaurant and had a great Roman/Italian Meal. We will see Bob and Jackie in a couple of years when we visit Canada and Alaska. Tomorrow, an early start. We visit he Vatican.