Around our place

The living conditions are fine.  We expected a small apartment and that’s what we got.  There’s room for a kitchenette dining table, couch, tv, and some storage on the main level. Upstairs there is a bathroom and loft bedroom that overlooks the main floor (comfy king size bed).  The ceiling is open beam construction (not just for looks, really an architectural feature) and the floors are all tiled.  The large window overlooks the street (alley?) called Via Della Reginella; we are door #6, second floor.  Here is our door.  It is about 9 feet tall and leads into a hallway and then a set of very uneven steps to our appartment.

 Here is a picture taken of our street close to our apartment.

Here is a picture of our apartment from the loft.

 

Here is a picture of Piazza Mattei right at the end of our street.

Everywhere you go there is something neat to look at.  Just around the corner we found ruins of a theater constructed by Caesar called Teatro Marcello.  Interestingly the foundation was still in good enough shape that 15 centuries later another building (I think it is a monastery) was built on top of it.

 

When we visited the Vatican, there were thousands of people there and I felt a bit like a sardine.  The light was not good for photography, so I am not real happy with most of the pictures.  There are so many wonderful things to see, you really don’t know what to photograph.  I decided to just post a few of the better pictures and not worry about the subjects.  I found the ceilings and the floors very interesting.  There is a picture below of a section of the floor tiled in thousands of little dark blue tiles, so fine you can’t pick out the individual tiles.  All of the floors are some kind of stone laid in intricate detail. 

 

There are a couple of pics below of ceilings in the Vatican Museum.  There is a very blurry picture that I included just to show the mass of people we were moving with and the length of the hallway.  This hallway contained mostly tapestry and the entire ceiling was filled with paintings.  I took this pic about half way down the hall.

 

The hallway ceiling looked like this all the way down.

 

This is a picture of a ceiling in the museum that appears to be sculpted figures, but our guide assured us that it was entirely flat figures made to look that way…how about that 3-D way back then.

 

There are tons of statues.  I include the picture below to show just a few.