The colors and textures of this city seduce me.

I want them all around me all the time.  In the city center, I turn a corner and an exposed building from oh, 100 A.D. props up a floor of modern apartments and rush hour traffic whirs by an ancient forum populated by cats.

The mash-up here has its own palette and it’s a feast for my eyes.

As I write this at 10:00 pm at night, the windows of our spacious apartment in Trastevere are wide open.  Cafes on the street below bustle.  We hear the clink of dishes, honking horns, the conversing voices.   I feel I am part of them–the throngs of saints and sinners in Rome filling the cafes tonight, crossing the river Tiber on their way to work or making their pilgrimages to the Vatican tomorrow morning.

We are at the end of our stay in Rome.  Tomorrow we head south to Potenza.  The past three days we have walked.  We’ve calculated 250 miles the first day, 175 yesterday and only 140 miles today.  We have no pedometers to verify those numbers so we’ve gone by how our legs feel when we climb into bed at night.  I’ll share highlights of where our achey feet took us below:

1) Santa Maria in Trastevere.  One of the oldest churches in Rome dating back to 220 A.D.  In the 13th century, magnificent mosaics were added by Pietro Cavallini.

2) An early morning walk over the Palentine Hill, the centermost hill of the seven hills of Rome and one of the most ancient.

3) Around the Forum ….

4) and into the Colosseum.

5) We wound our way through Rome’s center up to a church where we celebrated Sunday mass and then saw a few Caravaggio paintings in one of their alcoves.  On we went back across the Tiber to the Vatican.

 The Vatican is a world unto itself. I’ll save that for the next post.