We're starting out our journey to Europe at the Rome airport. It's a modern facility so it's really quite easy to get from your airplane to baggage claim. Of course, it takes a while to fly to Europe, but we've speed things up here and we have arrived in the blink of an eye. After a brief rest were eager to see the city.
Here's Sant Andrea Della Valle, with the second highest dome in the city, after St. Peter's. Inside the church it's a chance to look at these incredible artworks on display. Back in the Middle Ages, then onto the Renaissance and the Baroque, the church was all-powerful in Rome and throughout Italy and was the great patron of the artists. It has got an impressive mirror that allows you to look at the ceiling without straining your neck. You've got to get around in see every nook and cranny when you go into a stupendous church like Sant Andre della Valle. Another counterreformation masterpiece, and the Baroque style, built in the late 1600s. This church is on every corner it seems in the city. In fact, they have 500 churches in Rome.
After our visit to Sant Andrea. We worked up an appetite, and fortunately, just around the corner is the Campo de Fiori. It's surrounded by restaurants. Now granted these are somewhat touristic, but it's really wonderful place to eat. Pizzeria Virgilio was very satisfactory and look that wine. It's our first meal of the tour and already we're starting off with a bang. This is great. Everybody diving in and having some beautiful red wine at lunch. That's a good start. Okay, granted for you restaurant purists out there, you can get a better meal in Rome certainly and you can get a worse meal in Rome,l of course but these restaurants around the Campo have that one essential unique ingredient and that is this wonderful location. It's just a great spot to eat. And spaghetti is spaghetti. Really, you know there are different levels—there's great spaghetti and mediocre. Pizzeria Virgilio was quite fine, and a great place to begin our tour. Pizza was good, pasta was nice and there's great scenery sitting at an outdoor table at Campo de Fiori.
Well these neighborhoods all around are just saturated with charm and character. Your first walk should bring you into the Piazza Navona, with its picture-postcard perfect St. Agnese Church by Borromini, and the stunning Fountain of the Four Rivers by Bernini. You are going to notice right away the Roman Senate, a former Palace.
Ah, gelato. Here's a famous gelateria, San Crispino, noted for the fresh flavors that they make themselves.
Then you continue along the pedestrian alley where you soon arrive at the Pantheon. It's a perfect structure, still standing with its great dome intact after one thousand nine hundred years. It was the largest dome in the world until this century, and forms a spherical space that creates a balanced feeling of harmony. Its spherical design takes the shape of a bubble in a barrel where the height of 140 feet is equal to its width, a dome atop the cylindrical base wall. The Pantheon was probably designed, in part, by the emperor Hadrian in A.D. 125 as a temple to all the gods, and has served a variety of historical functions over its many years.
The Pantheon is situated on the Piazza della Rotunda, which has a beautiful fountain in the middle with an Egyptian obelisk. The fountain in the middle of the piazza was created by Giacomo della Porta in 1575.
Walk behind the left (east) side of the Pantheon to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, the only significant gothic church in the city. Even though Rome has been a religious and artistic center for 2,500 years, during the Middle Ages it was relatively unimportant and produced little in the way of gothic architecture that has survived, except for this impressive church.
Don't miss St. Ignazio, with its illusionistic ceiling mural painted during the 17th century by the Jesuit priest, Andrea Pozzo. This vivid three-dimensional perspective will shock your eyes with its realistic depiction of the heavens opening above and painted architecture that blends magically with the building so you don't know where one begins and the other ends.
A few blocks away, across the busy Via del Corso, is the spectacular Trevi Fountain, made famous in the movies "Three Coins in the Fountain" and "La Dolce Vita". It is very possibly the world's most beautiful fountain, depicting Neptune, god of the ocean, being pulled through a triumphal arch by wild horses amidst a torrential cascade, heralded by conch blowers. Here you must toss a coin over your shoulder once to come back to Rome, and once again for another wish.
Notice the busy pizzeria called Da Baffetto -- it's an expensive, tasty and famous.And then we're taking a stroll, it's getting late, the evening is descending now, and it's time to enjoy some of the city streets in the evening. It's very safe and peaceful with really interesting sights to see