mussolini, the synagogue, and a church steeple25th entry – italy 2014

Our first full day in Rome. (Yesterday, late afternoon, we walked along the Tevere up to Castel Sant’Angelo and down the grand boulevard that leads into St. Peter’s Square. The square wasn’t as over whelming as it is in full daylight.) I got up this morning and made my way down; I met one of the people who lives in the building and asked about where I could get some dolci for breakfast; he pointed me to a pasticceria around the corner.

After coffee and dolci, we began by again walking along the Tevere, this time going south to a huge bazaar of cheap clothes, cheap jewelry, cheap purses, cheap furs, cheap scarves, cheap this, cheap that. (I remember my mother and grandmother taking me to the bazaar down in Cosenza with all its bancarelle. When the bazaar is full of clothing vendors their stands in dialect are called bancarelle. This is to distinguish the bazaar from a farmers’ market or from an antique market.) We walked through the southern section of Trastevere making our way to the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trestevere. This is a Borghese church. (The noble families of Italy always had one son in the Papal court and he lived in a palace close to the Vatican. The son, by virtue of nobility, was always a cardinal. And these cardinals built churches throughout the city and became patrons for the areas/neighborhods where the commissioned church was built.)

The above image is of the horizon showing, from left to right, the winged angels atop of Mussolini’s famous building in Piazza Venezia, the Jewish Synagogue in the Campo di Fiori district and a steeple of a Catholic church in the next neighborhood down.