James Tucker in Cov

The Forum and the Palatine Hill are the centre of old ancient Rome, and I guess it's pretty lucky/incredible that so much of it still survives. The forum is the old city centre, full of republican temples and buildings, and then is towered over by the Palatine Hill, covered in (and mostly made of) ancient palaces. At one end of the whole spread is the colosseum, at the other end is the Senate (which still stands!) and Roman city hall. The Senate end (left) contains the Rostrum (apparently a low wall) where people made speeches and met up, a pillared temple, and triumphal arch.
Off to one side are the remains of the Basilica of Constantine, a huge, but less graceful Imperial building. Only one of the three aisles remains, but that's plenty all on its own. Apparently this is what the original St. Peter's would have looked like.
The Via Sacra is still pretty recognisable. To the right of the road is the Vestal temple, and to the left is apparently where Julius Caesar was cremated and memorialised. The hill rising to the right is actually mostly one huge ruin of Imperial palaces (see below). Anyhow, it was a hot, dry day, and though thousands of people headed into the site (it's free) we got there early enough to get a run of the place. The Palatine hill and Colusseum are more impressive in size and design, but it's the various familiar names and styles of the forum that really left an impression on me.

Gloucester is an old town on the banks of the Severn, in Western England. It was an old Roman town, and the four main streets (Southgate, Eastgate etc.) still run straight from the four gates to the central square, apparently on the old street-plan.
Gloucester has a small port at one end of the city that connects the Midlands canals with the sea via the Severn, and has some huge warehouses (being converted into condos, inevitably) to attest to that.
The main attraction in is the collection of churches, including a full set of old monastic ones, and the cathedral. Gloucester's cathedral has features from throughout the middle ages (see left, where Norman meets Gothic fairly inelegantly), but is probably most famous for its late High Gothic cloisters, which were used in the filming of Harry Potter films recently (right). The fan-vaulting on the ceiling is probably the first anywhere, though it was taken to greater heights on buildings like King's College Cambridge and the Henry VII chapel in Westminster. The ceiling in the nave is slightly earlier, but absolutely studded with gilded roof bosses and sculptures. Both the east windows are huge expanses of stained glass, and the choir is dark and richly decorated. And, there's a murdered King (Edward II) and a dispossessed one buried there too (William II's brother). The cathedral seems to have needed some pretty desperate repairs at some point, as there have been some extra buttresses tacked on here and there.
Still, the rest of the town, port and all, didn't seem anything too special, though that's what you get for going places in the rain, I guess. Summer by the river might have been a better option.

There's not an awful lot you can really say about St. Peter's Basilica. It's huge, but somehow doesn't seem as big inside as it does from the outside. From the outside I have no problems saying that it's probably the biggest building I've ever seen. Inside are a multitude of altars (at least 3 of which have the preserved bodies of popes visible through the front) and devotional works, primarily made of marble. Under the central altar (the bronze sculpture over it is over 100 feet tall) is a pit, in which can be seen the original late Roman shrine to St. Peter, still basically intact. Even farther below that is a series of caves in which an ancient cemetary has been found, which adds something to the claim that St. Peter's body is buried right under the church bearing his name.
We also managed to get into the crypt of the basilica, which put us level with the old Roman shrine to Peter, and in the tomb of the Popes. There were about 10-15 stone tombs there, including a very large and very plain one for John Paul II in a special side niche. It's obviously quite hard to get into the proper catacombs where the old graveyard is, but it was still interesting to find this core of the church that had been repeatedly built around.
Leaving the Vatican, we walked towards the river along a medieval city wall. This was the Pope's secret escape route to his castle- the Castel Saint Angelo. The castle, which we didn't go in, is actually the tomb of a Roman Emperor (Hadrian, I think). The papacy simply put some battlements and buildings on top, had them lavishly decorated, and made plans to flee there in case anything went badly wrong. There's a similar tomb for the Emperor Augustus, but it was never made into anything, and still stands on the other side of the river.
We had dinner near the Campo di Fiori, finally having discovered where the nightlife in central Rome was (about 200 feet from where we'd been looking,and ended up having a pasta meal in what I think was a very old house (on the right hand of the street). Like a few others, it had a proper tower, and I think that means it was the home of someone fairly important in the middle ages- I've heard of tower cities elsewhere in Italy, anyhow.
PS Below is one of St. Peter's greatest monuments for sheer lunacy- a marble skeleton running out with a blanket over its head. And it's about 25 feet high.

On day two in Rome, we headed out to the Vatican, with the plan of getting there nice and early (around 8 AM) and thus being at the head of the line when the doors opened between 9-30 and 10. It basically worked, and despite there being apparently between 15-20,000 people in the museums that day, it only occassionally felt massively busy and that was always due to the dreaded tour groups.
The Vatican museums are basically two parts- the old papal palaces, which contain rooms decorated by Fra Angelico, Raphael, and of course Michaelangelo, and the two huge galleries (they must have been nearly a kilometre long each) which house the various collections of art (Early Christian, Egyptian, Profane/Classical etc). We did the apartments first, and were routed through about thirty different rooms on our way to the Sistine Chapel, which we were always promised was just around the corner. Tour groups got to cut straight to the photo-ops, but we'd be in a collection of 20th Century religious painting, open the door marked "Sistine Chapel" and then end up on a roof somewhere. In the end, this was pretty good, as we got to see some things I never would have known were there, such as Raphael's frescoes (top).
The Gregorian Museum of Profane Sculpture was closed, which really disappointed me, because I wanted to see some of the famous Greek sculptures I knew were there, such as the Laocoon group, which was pulled out of the ruins of Nero's Golden House in the Renaissance. The palace had been untouched for 1500 years, and when it was finally explored, artists like Michaelangelo were faced with ancient sculptures every bit as good as their own. Instead of seeing those, I did get to see things like a 20-foot wide red marble bowl, apparently from Nero's rotating dining room.
On the long and winding way out, we saw papal artifacts such as the holy hammer and trowel used for putting up and taking down that wall in the north door of St. Peter's (only open for jubilee years) and then stumbled onto a courtyard full of old greek and roman statues. Most of the realyl famous stuff like the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon group were there. The fact that western civilisation basically forgot how to make art like this for a thousand years kept weighing on my mind, as did the fact that it was only rediscovered at a time when people were finally catching up to what the Romans had been able to manage.

A couple of weeks ago Laura and I got the chance to go to Rome for a four day long weekend (cunningly planned right before the four-day Easter long weekend). The basic idea was to see the main sights of Rome and to get somewhere much warmer than England (the trip was planned in February).
We flew out of the city airport, London's answer to the Toronto Island Airport. It's about 2 miles from where I live, and not all that busy, so we were able to take the Underground right there and breeze onto our plane (we did have to walk across the runway to get to it though). There were about 20 people on the flight and the main thing was that we got a pretty good view of the Alps, though exactly where, I'm not entirely clear on. We flew into the main airport in Rome, which did at least have a good rail link to the city.

We went to see the Trevi fountain in a rainstorm, which made London look the better option, and then somehow found our way to the Spanish Steps (above left. John Keats died in the house to the right of the stairs), which are also at the edge of a large set of public gardens. From there it was a short walk to the Pantheon (top) and the old Ghetto, as well as a Roman temple complex rediscovered in the 1920's. There was also a small island in the Tiber, reached by a Roman bridge and guarded by a medieval tower-house (right). So, we were doing well, but despite being in the centre of old Rome, we could barely find a place to eat, let alone get a drink or dessert or whatever. The main squares, lined with cafes were few and far between; there were, however, about a million twisty old streets to explore endlessly. On one of these we finally found a place to eat- good, cheap pasta and wine. Just when we thought we had this whole Rome thing figured out though, we headed back to the Metro station. Closed at 10:30 on a Thursday.

Here is a view of my work and its surroundings- I work in the basement of the black building on the lower right of the picture. Not bad, eh? And if it's nice out I can have lunch in the park, which gets really busy, but is still nice. There are even tame squirrels that'll take food from you if you let them (okay, that doesn't sound like a trick. I'll have to get a picture up).