I should add...

It's Sunday and Sarah has identified a few churches that hold mass in English. The closest is Trinità dei Monti which is the church at the top of the Spanish Steps. As we walk, we see dozens of joggers - it's the only day we see any joggers, so apparently Sunday is Runday in Rome. Every runner we see, regardless of age, runs at a fantastically slow pace, and it makes me feel all smug and superior knowing that I can run upwards of 7 kilometers per hour - until I remember that everyone here is running on cobblestones and probably would prefer to keep their ankles unbroken. We hike the steps only to find out that the mass times advertised online don't line up with the real life mass times. So we hike back down to another church and attend mass in Italian.

After this, we have a long walk (is there any other type in Rome?) in the direction of the Colosseum. We pass the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument - the wedding cake building - which was built in honour of the first king of Italy. We also pass numerous miscellaneous ruins. It occurs to me that my memory of Rome from nine years ago doesn't quite line up with how it is in reality. In my head, Rome seamless blended ancient ruins with ultra modern architecture. The seamlessness is there, but the modern buildings aren't as brand new as I remember, and while there are ancient structures, most of the older buildings are more 1850s and not Pantheon-era. Still, when you're walking down a street that leads toward the Colosseum, it gives you a disorienting, fallen-out-of-time feeling. Buskers add a fallen-out-of-place aspect to it as well. As we walk, someone is singing "No Woman, No Cry," we also pass a full on mariachi band playing an acoustic version of "Bamboleo", and somewhere else among all the cacophony, I swear I hear someone playing a didgeridoo. We don't actually go inside the Colosseum (it's my second lifetime Colosseum stroll-by), and it makes me feel a little lame, but Sarah has done it before and says that you don't really get onto the floor of it. You just walk around an upper balcony, and you have the option of getting your picture taken with some shoddy-looking centurions, but that's about it.

From there, we stop at a few other churches. They're starting to blend a little at this point, and the names aren't easy to remember, so I don't always know which church I'm in unless I snag a picture of the name somewhere. (Photographic evidence reveals that we were at St. George in Velabro at one point in the day. Others: ?) We walked along Circus Maximus, where chariot races happened once upon a time, but you really have to use your imagination, because at this point it's a big grassy field with an oval track of gravel. Last time Sarah's parent were in Rome, they'd stumbled across a cat sanctuary, and we took a bit of a wandering path to get there, but we eventually did find it. The Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary is situation among ruins where cats can wander and lounge. There's also an indoor area where the friendlier, pet-able cats stay, and the kids really loved it. Some of the cats there were taken in after getting injured - there are several three legged cats (getting along fine though). There's also a one-eyed cat named Calibano which I think we'll remember forever.

It's a lot of walking, and once we're back we let the kids mellow and some of the adults take a nap. Sarah has a few additional churches she wants to hit, so she goes off on a solo adventure. I don't have a record of her stops, so I'll let her add in some details of her own (either in the comments, of she'll come in and edit this post - probably taking out all my best swears while she's at it). We finish the day with dinner at a fancier-looking restaurant, but the food isn't quite as good as the night before, and we pledge to return to the other restaurant for our last night in Rome.