We slept well and awoke to sunshine and blue skies and a breakfast of oats, toast and excellent coffee served in our room.
We walked along the Moyka canal that runs along behind where we are staying to the Yusupov Palace.
The facade is undergoing restoration and was covered by scaffolding, but inside we went up a stunning white marble staircase to the state rooms.
These were all sumptuously decorated in the C19th and including a very pretty Green Drawing Room with remarkably contemporary looking Karelia birch wood furniture …
… the White Columned Hall …
Turkish Bath and also a theatre.
The palace is notorious for being the place where Rasputin was murdered in 1916 by plotters including Felix Yusupov. Apparently he was tricky to despatch, as he was first poisoned, then shot and finally drowned in the canal outside!
We hoped to see something of the Mariinsky Theatre as it’s history is as glittering as its auditorium, with many famous musicians, dancers and singers performing here but it was not possible without seeing a performance, and at the moment the Mariinsky is performing in London!
A need for some more roubles brought us into this huge skylighted banking hall which seemed to belong to an age gone by. Part bank, part post office, it was filled with people going about their business, with space to sit and write and plenty of tellers … and an ATM tucked away in the foyer!
We stopped for lunch in another cute eatery and Chris had a cheese roll while I had an interesting salad with pickled zucchini, roast beef and radishes. I really enjoyed my sea blackthorn cold tea with cranberry and honey, but Chris wasn’t so sold on his rather turquoise ginger lemonade!
The pretty blue Nikolsky cathedral reaches upwards with baroque spires and golden domes and is surrounded on two sides by canals. It also has a bell tower overlooking the canal.
We crossed Lviny most with regal lions keeping watch …
… then on to St Isaac’s Cathedral, named after St Isaac of Dalmatia on whose feast day Peter the Great was born. 100kg of gold leaf covers the dome alone and the interior is just as lavish with mosaics, marble and malachite.
We climbed the 279 steps to the dome and had a great view in all directions, to the Palace Square and Hermitage …
… across towards Vasilyevsky Island …
… and down into St Isaac’s Square .
Everyone was enjoying the sunshine and in Senate a Square we passed the huge equestrian statue of Peter the Great commissioned by Catherine the Great, which was later named the Bronze Horseman after a poem by Pushkin. It stands on the Thunder Stone, the largest stone ever moved by humans, using a metal sledge sliding on copper balls along a metal track taking 32 men 9 months.
Across the water is Vasilyevsky Island, which Peter intended as the heart of his city, but instead became the maritime hub. The cream and white building is Menshikov Palace which was the first stone building in the city and built by the first governor of the St Petersburg, which we didn’t visit, but was the setting for many banquets including the reception for Peter’s dwarf wedding at which Peter and his Court sniggered at some 70 dwarfs brought from all over Russia to attend the marriage of Peter ‘s favourite dwarf.
Next along the shore is the Kunstkamera, or Museum of Ethnology and Anthropolgy, billed as a top-sight but one we chose to miss as we didn’t fancy its collection of ghoulish biological malformations including babies in bottles.
Crossing the bridge, we walked to the Strelka where two rostral columns, studded with ships’ prows and sculptures representing Russia’s great rivers stand as landmarks. They were oil-fired navigation beacons in the 1800s and are still sometimes lit in public holidays.
From here there are views of The Hermitage one way …
and the Peter & Paul Fortress the other.
We took the bus back to the B&B, and picked a bus with a crazy bus driver. After jolting the lady beside him, Chris said sorry, the driver must be Italian, but the lady replied in perfect English, no he’s a crazy Georgian!’ We chatted with us till we got off, and she was delighted we were going to see so much of Russia and wished us a good trip.
We went to The Clean Plates Society for dinner, another modern Russian/fusion restaurant only a short walk away. I had crepe type pancakes with sour cream and red salmon roe followed by black pelmeni which were like little pasta parcels filled with beef and Chris had spinach and broccoli soup and Georgian lobio, a dish of stewed red beans with walnuts, cheese and coriander, all of which was delicious.
Tomorrow, we are off on a day out!
Much of the architecture in Rome is Baroque, born out of the Catholic Church’s determination to reassert itself after the Reformation and The Basilica di San Pietro is no different. We were there by 7.30 and walked through security and straight inside. It is huge, but felt somewhat impersonal.
… and admired the ceiling from below.
We took the lift then steps, stopping to walk round inside the dome where even the letters are 2m high …
… then between the layers of the dome to the top, with that view out over the Piazza San Pietro, designed by Bernini, which welcomes visitors with open arms.
Back to earth, we walked out across the piazza, stopping at a circular stone in the pavement which marks the focal points of an ellipse, from which the four rows of columns on the perimeter line up perfectly so the colonnade appears to be supported by a single line of columns. Clever stuff!
We were amazed how the queue had grown, and it was only 9am!
After breakfast we set off to the historical centre, passing the Trevi fountain which was undergoing its weekly clean and empty, carefully supervised by the police as some €20,000 is raked out each week and sent to local charities.
We picked up rolls for lunch at the nearby Antico Forno bakery …
It is covered in reliefs commemorating the campaign, with some 2590 figures carved on a series of marble drums. The detail of the soldiers in their armour going off to war in their boats, blessed by Neptune is amazing considering its age.
Moving on to Piazza della Minerva we took photos of the cute elephant statue by Bernini …
…then went to the roof bar of the Minerva Hotel as we were given a tip that there was a good view of the Pantheon … and there was.
The Pantheon was built by Hadrian in 125AD, and consecrated as a Christian church in 609AD. It is an engineering marvel, with the diameter equalling its height and the oculus 8.7m across and remains the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. It would have been richly decorated in its heyday and the niches filled with statues if the gods.
Just round the corner is Piazza Navona, Rome’s most famous square, with bars, buskers and lots of tourists and we found a nice little spot to watch the world go by.
Revived, we went and looked at Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi or fountain of the four rivers by Bernini, with figures representing the great rivers of the world – the Nile, Danube, Ganges and Plate and topped by yet another obelisk.
We returned to Cantina 26 for dinner and had another great meal – more pasta and aubergine patties with lemon sauce for Chris and Saltinbocca, a Roman speciality for me.
Unfortunately it became quite dilapidated before being restored but now contains a huge collection of stained glass, some original to the house, some remade from original drawings and other glass collected from the period.
As for getting back to the B&B, with a limited metro system, the Google bus information has been invaluable, telling us the best route and showing us where the bus stop is and even the time of the next bus and it also works for trams, so we got a ride back on this green one!
We then wound our way down mainly pedestrianised streets to the Trevi Fountain, a very Baroque gush of water over statues and rocks on the back of a Renaissance Palace. It was designed by Bernini and they say if you toss in a coin you will return to Rome but you’d be lucky to get close enough.
The villa itself contains a number of Mannerist frescos, but most people come for the gardens, which descend from the villa in a succession of terraces with some amazing fountains along the way.
The Canopus was another huge pool with a banqueting area, complete with statuary and a crocodile.
Early evening and we went for an Aperol spritz and some cheese to nibble on before dinner at Vino Tinto, a small local restaurant serving rich Roman food. We ordered far too much – a pasta dish each, both with asparagus but one with tomatoes and the other with porcini and truffle then Chris followed with smoked cheese and porcini and I had pork with truffles and walnuts – we rolled home!
Trastevere maintains its character thanks to its narrow cobbled streets lined by ancient houses and feels more like a small town in the countryside than a suburb of Rome.
Nearby is the C16 Villa Farnesina, a summer villa built for Agostini Chigi, the richest man in Rome, as a retreat from the city where he lived with his lover and entertained lavishly. He encouraged guests to throw the silver dishes into the river at parties but his servants secretly collected them with nets draped under the windows!
He commissioned fabulous frescos in many of the rooms including the Galatea fresco painted by Raphael depicting a sea nymph on her dolphin-drawn scallop shell chariot, and Cupid and Psyche surrounded by fabulous garlands with fruit and vegetables and the Sala Delle Prospettive where trompe-l’oeil balconies appear to give views over Rome.
Here’s a view of the pretty Ponte Sisto with St Peter’s in the distance.
Following in the footsteps of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, stopped at the Bocca della Verita or Mouth of Truth, an enormous Roman drain cover which was said to swallow the hand of anyone who did not tell the truth. There was a huge queue of people waiting to test their honesty, so I snapped someone else’s moment of truth!
We climbed up to the Capitoline Hill, which in the days of imperial Rome, was the spiritual and political centre and the name comes from Capit mundi, or head of the world, and passed between the statues of Castor and Pollux.
The Piazza dei Campidoglio was redesigned by Michelangelo for Pope Paul III who wanted a symbol of the new Rome to impress Charles V. The site was difficult as the buildings did not face each other squarely, and the whole site sloped. Michelangelo remodelled the palazzi, and designed an egg-shaped design on the pavement which draws the eye to the central statue of Marcus Aurelius, transforming the piazza into a harmonious space despite being trapezoid. The thing that surprised me most was that in Rome where everything is bigger than you expect, this was actually smaller!
We ended the afternoon at the Catacombes de Priscilla, far less busy than those along the Appian Way and more interestingly open! There are some 13km of tunnels on three levels, dug into the soft tufa rock between the 5th and 9th centuries. After that they were forgotten till they were rediscovered in the C16. Many tombs had been looted and there are no bones remaining in the section we visited, but rows of body sized cavities one above the other in the soft brown rock on each side of the tunnels.
High humidity has destroyed most of the fresco but scraps remain, including Mary and Jesus, the Magi and the Good Shepherd.
Off Travelling Together 