This morning when we got up we went to breakfast and asked the hotel to call the Vatican and the Catacombs to find out if anyone had handed in our passports. This was a negative so our next stop was the Australian Embassy.
We caught a cab there and everyone there was very nice and extremely helpful. We had to go & get a passport photo taken & then pay for emergency passports. Luckily for us the guy at the Embassy indicated that we could pick them up the next morning at 9am.
That suited us as we had to rebook our flights to Tokyo for the next day otherwise we were going to lose our flight.
Once we had the passport situation sorted we decided to go & see a few more things in Rome. The weather was not the best, it was raining but we headed off anyway.
From our hotel we walked in a different direction towards the Piazza della Repubblica. The buildings in this square are in a semi-circle with a fountain in the middle called Fountain of the Naiads.
There is also a massive basilica there called Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri or The Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs.
From here we walked to the Piazza Barberini which has a fountain called Triton Fountain (1642–3) sculpted by Bernini.
Then it was on to the Spanish Steps. As it was raining we couldn’t sit on the steps and people watch. We bought very expensive gelato and stood in a doorway watching the world go by.
We wandered back to our hotel, looking at all the shops. If you wanted to purchase clothes this is the place to buy them. Besides the usual shops we have in Australia you also have Italian designers that I suspect you can’t get in Australian. They were all having sales too, but unfortunately we couldn’t fit much else into our luggage! As it was we had to sit on our bags to close them and when we unzipped them they basically sprang open like in the cartoons when all the clothes fly out? Not that bad but close!
As usual along the way we discovered Trajan’s Column, a Roman triumphal column that commemorates Roman emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. The Column was completed in AD 113 and is most famous for its spiral bas relief, which artistically describes the epic wars between the Romans and Dacians (101–102 and 105–106).
