Thursday, May 17th - Breakfast at the hotel is in their rooftop garden room and includes an assortment of meats, cheeses, scrambled eggs, breads, yogurts, juices, and espresso from an automatic pod type machine. We had 11:00 am tickets for the Borghese Gallery and decided to walk there. We left the hotelat 10:00 am and found that the Borghese was much closer than we thought, arriving there in about 20-minutes.  I picked up our tickets early and avoided the last minute crunch of tourists.  Photography was not permitted inside, so I have nothing to share with you visually. 

Borghese Gallery

Daniel, Karen, Sharona and Donna
Outside the Borghese in the Gardens

Most of the art is sculptures by such artists as Pietro Bernini, Canova, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the last having created some of the most remarkable marble sculptures imanginable. a trademark of his was creating some portion of th sculpture "outside the block", an amazing accomplishment at the time.

We lunched at Gastronmia with panini sandwiches before heading off by cab to the Trastevere area, beginning with a tour of the Synagogue and Jewish Museum.

Lunch at Gastronmia

In the 16th century Pope Paul IV forced jews to reside within a walled ghetto, and permitted the construction of a single synagogue. As there were numerus sects of judiasm in Rome at that time, the jews contructed a single building, but inside it contained three seperate synagogues. When Italy was unified in 1870, the ghetto was demolished and the Jews allowed to build whatever they chose. They built a magnificent synagogue in only three years on the site the original.  We plan to attend services there tomorrow.

Synagogue in Ghetto

We walked across the Tiber River to walk the street of Trastevere, a very colorful area with lots of shops, churches (of course) and restaurants.  We tried unsuccessfully to get into two highly recommened restaurants but found a place called Costanza.  We ordered several pastas, salads, and a single fish for the five of us. Teh local name for the fish was Pezzonia, but the waiter said we may know it better as Black Spot. Never heard of either. It was presented filleted in a garlic, peper and tomato sauce and was excellent.The wine, Serego Alighiere Anniversario Valpolicella 2009 (15 Euros) was terrific. We ended up having two bottles. Our waiter highly recommended it, and we surprised that it was one of the least expensive bottles on the wine list.

Tiber River

We had to take two cabs back to the hotel as we could not find one that could hold all five of us as we were able to on the way to the area.  We arrived back at the hotel about 11:30 pm. Having left our hoel at 10:00 am that morning, it was quite a long day to say the least.  We were all exhausted, but pleased with the days activities and meals.