Rome Day 12

Day 12
We woke up again for our All American Breakfast! it was as great as the day before... But it fed these hungry travellers none the less. We then went back to our room, prepared some nice hearty sandwich's and headed off onto the famous rome transportation system!
Buy a Roma Pass - 20 Euro's (all you want transport for 3 days - n0t 72 hours, and gives you 2 free museum entrances)
We started off by going to see the Pantheon, a large old temple that was changed into a church. This one room massive structure is built in a dome shape with a large circular opening at the top without any means of closing. With this taken into account, what happens if it rains you may ask? Well along the floor there is a draining system (26 holes to be exact, I may be slightly off... so not exact). The one thing we cannot answer is, what if it rains during mass...
After the Pantheon we headed over to the largest park in rome ( not exactly sure of its name). As we entered through the main gate, in broad daylight and right in the middle of the open grass, a young couple was showing some of their true public affection... We quickly walked into the park and went on our way exploring the many different piazza's and fountain found here. It was a very nice walk which landed us at our next stop, in the heart of the park: Borghese Museum. This museum had two floors; the first one consisted of many statues and mosaics with different themes in each room (example: Hercules room). The second floor consisted of paintings from the 1,300's - 1,500's A.D along with porcelain statuettes. All in all the museum was well done, a bit short but full of interesting history and objects. Upon exiting it started to rain heavily. Out of nowhere a man selling umbrella's tried to swindle us into buying one, many other had already purchased an umbrella, but Ola and I decided to get soaked! We started heading out to Rome's National Museum. Within 30 seconds to 1 minute the rain abated and we saved 10 euro's (hehe all those suckers who bought umbrella's)! On our way to the museum we stopped at piazza Della Repubblica - a large fountain near central station. We stopped here to have our sandwich's and feel the ncie cool mist coming off of it, it was now very hot. We then made our way two blocks downwards to the museum. Inside we bought our tickets (as we used all of our free entrances at the other museums, but the roma pass still gave us 50% off [6.50 euro each savings]). This museum had three floors: the basement had a massive coin collection - with complete sets starting from around the beginning of A.D to the present - including the Euro's made specifically for Italy. Each display had magnifying glass that moved so u could see the details on the coins... None but two of these magnifying glasses worked (they were electronically used with a keypad, which were broken). So we see that the entrance fee definately didn't pay for those hehe. After that we headed to a second room in the basement which displayed the mummified remains of 6 year old girl and her sarcophagus. There was also a video on the procedure of mummification and how to conserve it. It was a bit eary, so we didn't stay in there too long! The first floor/main floor was like all the other museums, it was filled with statues and head of statues, mostly outlining the different styles/era's. There was also a few pieces of the calenders the Romans used in the past and the holiday dates in which they followed.
Roman Calender
What was very cool to see, was the Romans system of dates is almost identical to the system we use today. (they had 364 days a year + 1 day / 4 years [leap year]) ---> one of the emperors changed it to this sytem when the mathmeticians of the time found this to be correct. For 1 year before this system was introduced the emperor played with the days in order to catch up to the correct pattern! HUH? if your that interested look it up!
In the center of this floor was a garden, it was very nice except for the fact the water probably hadn't been filtered since the roman empire! On the second and final floor were statues of Athletes. here is the order in which they were displayed:
Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Apollo, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Hercules, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete's, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete, Athlete
(all statues) you get my drift! But it was still fun to look at all the different stances/poses they had! After this museum we were right next to central station, so we hopped onto the underground and then the bus and headed back to the hotel. Ola took a little nap, while Darrin surfed the net and msn, on the one and only computer for 1,000+ room hotel! At 9:30 pm our friends from Venice arrived. They were exhausted and hungry so we decided to find a local pub and pick up some grub! Ola used her italian to order (ohhh ahhh). We then went back to the hotel and went to sleep.