A Roma! Lo adoro!

Ciao ragazzi!
After a fairly comfortable and uneventful flight I am back in lovely Italy.  Even the nonstop drizzle can't get me down.  Of course, everything is molto fabuloso and I spent my first day pushing through the typical exhaustion one experiences after an international flight and being awake for far too long. I checked in to Hotel Sonya, left my luggage as the room was not ready yet, and took off for a little walk.  I went to a Tabacchi and bought a Roma Pass, which is incomprehensible but gets you free access to public transport and a few museums.  First stop was the National Museum of Rome.  Featuring lots of gorgeous busts and statuary from the Glory Days of antiquity, it is housed what used to be Palazzo Massimo.  The building is magnificent.  It is right next to Roma Termini.  In fact, many of the pieces in this museum were unearthed right in this area.  When construction began on Roma Termini (the train station) they realized they were about to build on top of this massive villa and garbage dump of glorious objets.  THEIR garbage is decidedly better than ours because it included items like:

"The Boxer" ~ An exquisite bronze of muscularity with a tinge of exhaustion and defeat.  His broken nose, his scars and wounds, his wrapped hands complete with metal knuckles, his back muscles....so very fab, and his overall nakedness make him quite the thing to behold!  So very Roman.
And his counterpoint:

"The Disc Thrower" encapsulates the Greek fascination with not just athletic prowess, but more philosophically, the moment... that nano-second moment of splendor when mind and body work in unison!  It's the wind up!  He hasn't thrown the discus yet.  You can see the concentration, the mental part of the sport, on his face.  You are witness to his physical training just by looking at his body.  But perfection in sport is mind and body, in sync.

So of course, that means it's time for lunch, at a lovely trattoria by S. Maria Maggiore:

From there, a very long and confusing walk through ruins:

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And then, in the Church of St Stephen, a tribute to my beautiful sister, Laura.  (In Italian, you would pronounce it LA-OO-RAH).  There is a marble effigy of him encased in plexiglass.  Slots allow people to drop in notes, photos, pleas for help.  I dropped in a photo of my beautiful sister so she can just be there.