Italy Blog entry #2 – Ben

The view from our apartment!

Ben and the catapult

On our second day of exploration, we changed our plans due to the need for a cell phone, since there is no phone in our house. We were planning to visit a church full of mosaics, but since we were on the wrong side of the neighborhood after our visit to the cell phone shop, we ended up going to Castel Sant’Angelo, built as the mausoleum for the emperor, Hadrian (138 AD). He built his own since the other one where the other emperors were buried was full. Can you imagine building an entire castle just to bury yourself?! The mausoleum of Hadrian, renamed Castel Sant’Angelo in 590 AD, was renamed when the pope at the time suddenly had a vision of an angel floating over the castle. It was during a parade to pray for the town. The parade was to hopefully end the long wave of plague, a disease brought over from rats with fleas.

It was mobbed. The bridge leading to the castle must have had 300 people on it. As we entered the castle, we walked up a long windy ramp filled with display cases on the left. There were sections of the original tiles that lasted nearly 2000 years. 1 tile had popped out. I picked it up to take home as a souvenir, but put it back. The last thing you want to do is misplace ancient stuff in Rome.

We finally got to the burial chamber. His epitaph (which he wrote himself) was carved into a stone plaque on the wall. Translated into English it goes something like this:

“Vague, wandering soul
Guest and companion of my body
prepare now to descend to places pallid
rigid and bare
your play at last has ended.”

Then we entered a room full of statues and carvings of Hadrian and some other people. In the room next door a video was showing about old Roman and Egyptian stuff. It was in Italian, but we could understand pretty well.

We walked up some steps and came to a bar with a balcony. We got a bottle of water and enjoyed the nice view of Rome. Then we walked up another set of stairs to the terrace. What a view! We could see the river, the coliseum, the Vatican, and all of old Rome. The pope lives in a big house.

Lastly, we went back to ground level and checked out the cannonballs. They were from 138 AD but the catapult was from some time later in the medieval period. We splashed our faces with cold water, filled up our water bottle, and caught a tram back home.