October 24, 2011
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So you've seen pictures of most of the stuff I saw during my trip to Rome, I know. Therefore, I'm going to give you pictures not of the Colosseum or the Sistine Chapel, but of stuff you might not have seen.For example, you might not have seen the medieval ruins at the Garden of Ninfa. This is the Garden of the Nymphs, a very lovely public garden built on the site of a 14th century village.
The prince of the village had a falling out with his brother, his brother destroyed his village, and so they all gave up and left it in ruins.
I kind of wondered about this as we were touring all the ruins. There must have been a time between when these buildings stopped being usable and the time when they became picturesque ruins worth saving. Why didn't anyone ever think about cleaning them up or fixing them during that time? Perhaps they were too impoverished, what with all the barbarians and sackings and whatnot.
I don't know. I guess it worked out for the best, though. The ruins are very cool.
Ninfa is outside of Rome, in the lovely countryside. It smells good, unlike Rome. In Rome, people smoke on the street all the time, and there's all kinds of traffic, and there is also an odd sugary smell that I kept encountering. Perhaps it's the sum of all the gelato stands.
The people from big cities were marveling at how clean Rome was, though, so those of you from big cities needn't feel that Rome is a particularly smelly place.
Those of us from the country -- well, good to know that the countryside in Italy, like our countryside, smells delightful.
While we were at Ninfa, a great thunderstorm arose and scared people a lot. It scared me less, because we have those where I live, but the people from Colorado and California just about jumped out of their skins. We therefore had to return to the bus instead of seeing the rest of the garden.
The bus took us to a nice little ristorante for a vegetarian meal. We couldn't identify all the stuff they fed us, and we upset them quite a bit by leaving without drinking espresso, but I enjoyed it. Probably not as much as I would have enjoyed the garden. However, this was very unusual weather for Rome, so we all made the best of it.
