A Prosciutto e Melone Day

I've been sitting up past midnight pasting words and pictures together.  Today I think I'll do it in stages. It's the middle of the afternoon now and already we've had some adventures.

First of all we got up much earlier, probably out the door by 7:30am being refreshed by the fact that it was in the 60s overnight (and only got into the lower 80s all day). Thinking of coffee we wandered around to our "usual" (sheesh) spots but they were all in the process of opening.  Then I remembered that where you start the day in Italia is at the tabacchi, the place where you get a cafe, a shot of brandy, a lottery ticket, or some tabacchi (tobacco).  I don't know why I hadn't thought of this sooner because there is no better place for people watching than this.  We sat there for an hour and a half or two hours soaking up this bit of "real Italy".  As long as you have a glass with something in it in front of you, you can sit there, as in most Italian places, forever.  The trick is to lift and tilt the cup barely enough to wet your lips; stretch it out as opposed to my very usual gulp it down.

We head west from the piazza and this is the first thing we see.

Nancy photographs graffiti which if I did it would be considered lunacy. 

Well, we couldn't sit there forever but we were both peculiarly lacking in ambition. We did take advantage of our stop at the tabacchi to buy biglietti mensili, monthly tickets, for the Metro (which also works the buses and trams). However our ambition did not stretch so far as to actually use them yet. Instead we decided just to wander around the 'hood. We headed east only a few blocks down wonderful tiny streets ending up at the Forums of Augustus and Nerva.

These are less developed and excavated forums to the east of Via dei Fori Imperialli rather than to its west where the developed and "tourable" forums are. This appears to be a dead end but there is a small footbridge which crosses over from the Via into Monti knowing about which may come in handy later.

Heading back we took some of the side streets off the side street, particularly the one that led to the Mercato Rionale or what is apparently the (official) neighborhood market. There were a lot of stalls with only a few occupied but we were able to get some peaches shaped like tomatoes (back when tomatoes were tomato shaped) and some prosciutto di Parma.  This latter we took back to the apartment and immediately combined with a cantaloupe that we had for melone e prosciutto, an Italian classic and beyond good. We had had it as an antipasto yesterday afternoon and couldn't wait to have it again.

One somber bit from the morning's walk were the memorials above commemorating locals who were taken by the Germans to Auschwitz and killed.

Later, back on our "home" piazza, but approaching it from a different angle we saw this, what?, emblem set on the corner of a building we had passed under daily.  "Oh my god, that may be a Della Robbia" says Nancy. "Della Robbia?" thinks Paul. Well she may be right as judging from the Wikipedia article it looks rather like his work but that article also has most of his work in museums.

Basically between the two meeting churches runs Via delle Quatro Fontane, the road of four fountains so named for an intersection each corner of which has, I'll bet you can guess, a fountain.  This is one of them.

What was it, around 11am?  And Nancy expressed a desire to hit a meeting at St. Andrew's at 12:45pm.  I gave her careful instruction on how to walk up the hill to get there but then had the bright idea of showing her how the Metro system worked.  We toddled over to the Cavour station, took the train up the hill to Termini, changed trains and went over to Repubblica, not far from either of our two meeting places. We walked over and eyeballed St. Andrew's and then returned the one block to St. Paul's where there is a better cafe.  Nancy had a cappuccino and went to her meeting while I stayed and had lunch. We decided to walk back, at least as far as Termini but it's hard to pass up a free, or at least "paid for" ride so we "trained" all the way home.

So Nancy's napping, I'm typing, and the afternoon is dwindling.  I wonder what the evening will offer?

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Well, the evening offered this.  It was moving towards evening, say 5pm or 5:30pm when I decided to go for a walk with the ostensible goal of looking for a particular neighborhood bookstore.  Nancy said she'd like to join me so off we went.  About the time that we got to the non-existent bookstore's address Nancy started feeling faint so, with some concern, we got back to familiar territory and went to a familiar restaurant which, I think both sitting and eating, restored Nancy to mid-season form.

Me, looking disgusted after Nancy whipped out her camera to photograph ... my desert.  I'm not going to show you my desert.  It was fabulous.

After dinner we took quite a long ramble north on Serpenti to Panisperna, then west almost to where it joins Nazionale, then back south again on a "shortcut" road that edged along the eastern fori, extremely narrow, down which cars and motorcycles went flying.  This brought us back to the neighborhood of our morning walk.

And basically a few more photos from the day:

Beginning our vehicle motif, me beside a Piaggio Ape three wheeler.

And Nancy beside a great old cinquecento.

A shot through the window of the Tabacchi 

Another neighborhood corner artwork which Nancy says is "definitely" a Della Robbia. If so it shows, a point Nancy keeps emphasizing which I think goes uncaught, the durability of ceramic; this would be, what?, five hundred years old.

And another memorial in the neighborhood to people killed by Germans in WW-II