Roma If You Want To: Snow Many Churches in Rome

Oops, sorry for the long wait on this post…this week has been full of snow, churches, churches, snow, churches, and studio work.

Last weekend Rome was hit with a heaping 4 inches of snow. What would have been considered a minor flurry at home in PA set the entire city into total shut-down mode. Luckily I didn’t need to get anywhere because public transportation was down, too, and instead we had a lazy weekend in our apartment. We ventured out once to get a hot chocolate from the neighboring café, and once for groceries to cook ourselves a snow day bunch feast—pancakes included. Tons of the locals were out in the streets playing in the snow (and MoonBoots were everywhere).

The rest of the week was filled with class trips to different sites around the city, including Trajan’s Markets, Palazzo Barberini, and a churches designed by big-name Baroque architects, Borromini and Bernini. On our cartography walk this week we stopped in one church to see Michelangelo’s Moses sculpture, and another to see the ruins of an ancient warehouse that an also-very-old church was built on top of. I’m feeling a little churched-out after this week, but walking through the more-than-impressive, elaborate structures really gave me a sense of how insanely powerful and wealthy the Catholic church was throughout history.

Elisabetta, my Masters and Monuments teacher, toured us through the Roman forums and Trajan’s Markets, an ancient marketplace built into the Quirinal Hill. Much of the original structure still remains, though it has been largely reconstructed, because the building was slightly altered and reused during the Medieval Times as an apartment complex. Essentially Trajan’s Markets is the earliest model of the modern day shopping mall, originally housing about 150 businesses, shops, bars, and restaurants.

This week we are all working on finishing up our studio project to submit to an international competition and on Saturday I am headed to Viareggio, in Northern Italy, for the Carnevale parade and celebrations with some of my classmates. Stay tuned for pictures and a blog post next weekend. (I’ll try to be on time…)