Roma with the Christians
Arriving early afternoon, we headed straight out to go see some things, like:
The Victor Emmanuel Monument.
The Pantheon (built between AD 118-125)…
…with its vast dome – a marvel of Roman engineering.
Piazza Navona and its Baroque fountains.
And Campo de Fiore (‘field of flowers’) with its colourful markets. This square was where the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for daring to suggest that the earth moved around the sun.
After so much walking in the heat (Italy was experiencing a bit of unseasonably warm weather while we were there) we looked longingly at the double-decker hop-on-hop-off tour buses which seemed to be constantly whizzing past us.
So we sought out a stop to get onto one of these buses.
There’s about five or six different ‘brands’ of these buses, but there was just one bus at the stop when we got there – the yellow ‘Roma Cristiana’ bus. The nuns sitting up the top with their commentary headphones plugged in should have been a clue.
Yes, we spent three days hopping-on and off the Christian tour of Rome. Apart from a bit of excessive narration about persecutions at all the various sights, it was a completely adequate choice, and there was several times when we were stuck over the other side of the city from the hotel, were hot and were tired, when I was heard to exclaim, “Thank God for the Christians!” when the bus appeared around the corner and we could clamber aboard.
St Peter’s, Vatican from the top of the bus.
Coming back alongside the River Tiber.
