042 palazzo altemps

Above: view of Piazza del Popolo. Look carefully at the Egyptian obelisk, it's actually just scaffolding.

Saturday was my move day, and it took longer than I thought to compile my suitcase of possessions, make sure Delfina's house was neat and clean, drag everything a few blocks over, and unpack again. But I really like my new place - I have a nice view out of my window, my own private wall-mounted remote control air conditioner, and an incredible library in my room... Diana studied Anthropology at university (La Sapienza here in Rome), so she has history books, books on culture from all over the world, and a lot of feminist books. The collection is about half english, half italian, so I will have plenty of reading material for the remainder of my stay here. Of course, I'm pretty caught up in re-reading Atlas Shrugged for the umpteenth time.

Mondiale: Italy wins again, and now we are down to an all-European final four: Italy, France, Portugal, and Germany. Italy plays Germany tomorrow night at 9 pm Rome time (3 pm EST). One more win gets them into the championship game, but Germany will have the home field advantage.

A linguistic note about buses. In DC, when the driver doesn't open the back door, the proper response for a passenger is "back door". That's it, just a noun. In Rome, the proper response is "apre" (open), just a verb. In one case the verb is implied, in the other case the noun is implied.

On Sunday I went to see Palazzo Altemps, one of the 4 Roman history museums. The museum is located in the heart of the Centro, close to Piazza Navona. The museum consists exclusively of ancient sculptures, almost all depicting Greek and Roman deities - Athena, Aphrodite, Zeus, Hera, Mars, Neptune, etc. The museum closed at 7:30; since I arrived at 5:30 pm and was more or less alone the entire time. It was actually pretty eerie being alone in the dark rooms with 12-foot-tall statues of Athena and friends towering over me.

The key piece of the Museum is the sculpture entitled Suicide of the Gaul and his Wife.

As of yesterday, there's a new candidate in the lead for Most Obnoxious American Tourist: a woman trying to buy fast food at a stand at the side of the road. "Do you take credit cards?" (louder) "Credit card?" "CREDIT CARD?" (even louder) "CREDIT CARDA, CREDIT CARDA?" (then showing him her card and pointing to it) "CREDIT CARDA!!!!!!!!!!!"