And Then Rome

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Originally uploaded by davethetemp.

We left Barberino Val d'Elsa after a wonderful week and drove down to the big city. We parked the car at the airport there and caught a cab to our apartment. It was a white knuckle ride down the Appian way. We found ourselves at our Rome apartment and (as before) it was very nice and right in the heart of medeival Rome. I read that our street was created during an Urban renewal project in 1425. The picture at left was taken in a neighbourhoood a ten minute walk from our apartment. In one picture you can Rome in several periods. The amptheatre was built for Marcus Aurelius. Those are people standing near the base. It's been housing for a millenia now and those are condos along the top (Sophia loren owns one, I hear). At the right of the photo is a medieval church. That's not a hill between it and the tower, the rubble of a thousand years is why the two buildings are at different levels. Apparently that church was packed with Jewish attendees every Saturday because this was also the jewish ghetto. the pope ringed the ghetto with churches and made attendance mandatory. The yellow building in the background is the synagogue of Rome. In a small piazza between the collumns and the synagogue, the Nazis rounded up the jews in 1944 and gave them an ultimatum. They needed to gather 50 Kg. of gold within 24 hours or they would all be sent to concentration camps. They and many other citizens of Rome worked together and they amassed the gold. A few weeks later the Nazis began deporting them anyway.