The Ceiling looks better if you squat...

It's officially my last week in Rome, and I'm realizing just how little I've actually written about in this blog. so from here on out I'm going to try to update once a day and write as much as humanly possible. But to be fair, the past two days have been my weekend, so not much of anything happened. Really just spent some time ambling down Roman cobblestone streets and doing homework. And the weather here has been rainy and cold, on and off, for about three days now.

This morning we got a HUGE treat- we didn't have class until 9:45 (as opposed to the usual 8:30), so I got an extra hour of sleep. AND the sun was out, an added bonus (as I'm writing this, it's gotten considerably cloudy and threatening rain.. can't have too much of a good thing)! First stop was the Baths of Diocletian, built around 300 CE on the Esquiline Hill for the exploding population of Rome. It was the largest of all the Roman baths, converted into a church in the 1500s under Michelangelo's oversight. The exterior of the church faces Piazza Repubblica and looks like a segment of a dome. The interior has the best faux-paintings I've seen during our entire trip (and I've seen a fair share)- for instance, there was an altar painted onto one of the walls that looked as if was real. It was only as I was leaving did I notice that it was a painting. Regardless, it was definitely one of my favorite churches...second to Santa Maria in Cosmedin.

S. Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiris

An hour-long bus ride later, we hopped off at the Vatican and toured/wandered around St. Peter's for a while. Since I had already been during mass, I had seen most of it, but I feel like St. Peter's is one of those places where new things crop up every time you see it. The Pieta is much smaller in person, by the way. The entire thing was beautiful, but it just made me curious as to why so many people over the past thousand years have converted to Christianity. St. Peter's is glistening with gold and shaking under the weight of its marble- what poor peasant who was starving would turn down a chance to be around all of that wealth (literal and figurative)? But it's just a thought.

View from seat at Mass, St. Peter's Basilica

Since we had such a short class period, a couple friends and I walked around the Vatican area and windowshopped. In Rome, it seems to me that you can either get Versace or buy something from a street vendor. There really aren't very many in-between stores, either for quality or price. But it's fun to go look around in, oh- I don't know- Tiffany's, where there are no price tags so you know everything is astronomically priced. The fact that finals are in just a few days made us head back early to study and nap... and update blogs. Side note: Apparently for lunch I chose anchovy pizza... let's just say I'm never coming near those things again. The smell alone is enough to knock out Mike Tyson.