The heart of Rome and Jewish Ghetto

Today we accomplished a lot of sightseeing! Even though there is an abundance of VoiceMap tours in Rome, most of them were of certain neighborhood or theme and we felt that we needed a general overview. We decided to trust Rick Steve’s and did his Heart of Rome tour, plus his inside tour of Pantheon. Once again, the tour confirmed what I remembered about Rome from 15 years ago - it’s a layer cake of slices of history, often overlapping and incorporated in the same buildings. I should mention that in general Rome was very crowded - we were able to snatch two last Vatican tickets for yesterday and all the other days were sold out. And all the touristy sites were packed. Trevi fountain was overrun by packs of selfie snapping and instagram positing tourists. We also went inside the Pantheon which we never visited before. The buildings dome was absolutely mind blowing especially for the fact that it’s for the first century AD!! The building was a temple to Roman gods, later converted to a church and now housing the remains of many famous people, including Rafael. After the tour, we felt sufficiently oriented and did a VoiceMap tour of the Jewish Ghetto. It was once again a reminder of a familiar theme of antisemitism and prosecution. We visited a grand synagogue of Rome from the 19th century which is stunningly beautiful. We then walked back home snapping pictures of seemingly random Roman ruins in the middle of the streetRead more