Journey to Europe: Day Six The Borghese Gallery and Gardens

Itinerary

• 1:00 – Lunch
• 2:30 – Borghese Gallery tour
• 5:00 – Garden tour
• 8:00 – Dinner

A fountain in the park

Accordion player

Sunday, day six we got to sleep in and eat breakfast. We actually walked to the Borghese Park from our hotel wandered for a bit and then sat for a bit-watching people in the park. Then we got sandwiches at a little food stand, like the stands you see at like art fairs, and had a picnic in the park listening to an accordion play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 and other recognizable classical songs. That was probably my favorite lunch the whole trip; eating in the park, watching people, and listening to an accordion play classical music. 

Alec in front of the Borghese Gallery

Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina. That is made of
marble...

After lunch we headed into the Borghese Gallery for our tour. The Gallery was a very strict gallery, no camera, and no bags policy. If you needed to have something with you, you had to put it in a see through bag, even if it was just a water bottle. So we checked our bags in our tour group locker.

 It was fun learning about the Borghese family, seeing beautiful sculptures done by Bernini, and paints by artist I’ve heard of. Our tour guide was really good; she was Canadian, but now living in Rome with her Italian family. She told put so much excitement into her stories while talking about the sculptures and paintings, we hung on her every word.

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne
All Bernini's pieces had some kind
of exciting story to tell.

"Lake" in the park. What Italians consider a lake,
we Michiganders consider a pond.

A Passion Flower our tour guide found that reminded
her of her grandmother.

Immediately proceeding the gallery tour we took a tour around the park or gardens. There is a secret garden at Borghese, but it is not open to the public, but we got to sneak peaks of it through the iron fence surrounding it. It was just a short tour, where our guide would just tell us what a couple things were and pointed us in directions of where to go. We ended at a spot that over looked Rome and where most newly weds come to take photos, which a couple was up there.  

We walked down to the Piazza del Popolo to see a church that our guide pointed out to go see that had a famous painting inside, but we got lost, because there has to be over a hundred churches in Rome and near this Plaza there was probably five churches and it was a Sunday. The church that we thought it was in there was a mass going on, so we didn’t want to bother. We trekked back toward our hotel passing by the Spanish Steps, which surprisingly had a Marching Band of some sorts playing music on it. It was kind of cool, but still way too many people.

View of Rome

Following having dinner we went to walk around the Colosseum, we were going to go that morning, but found out there was a workers strike and was not able to go see it in its entirety. Thus we walked around it, walking there we saw some archeological site, of things workers found while working on the new metro line they are in progression of, Line C. Once we got to the Colosseum, we got a surprise, that night the moon was full and bright as ever. The pictures I took do not give it justice, but it was a beautiful scene. Being able to take picture of the moon peeking through the Colosseum was a great end to the day.