Wednesday in Rome

BTW...Ellen is blogging today's entry.

In Drew's words today was 'another death march'. This is why Joel and I are sitting at a bar/internet cafe by ourselves FINALLY finding the internet we needed. Today we saw the Pantheon which we all thought was fascinating. For me the absolute highlight was the St. Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains) Church which houses three of Caravaggio's original paintings of St. Matthew. We had to put one Euro in the illuminating box several times until I got my fill. Sweet!

We also saw an original Michelangelo (Christ Bearing the Cross) in Santa Maria sopa Minerva church which was also a thrill (mostly for me, but the others seemed at least interested.) Here we also lit a candle for Grandma Kay and bought her a beautiful rosary...her favorite souvenir.

After some discussion over some awesome pizza (our first pizza in Italy) we decided to give the Capitoline Museum a whirl on the way home. Overwhelming!! So much sculpture and painting in one spot that our heads were spinning. All good, but perhaps the reason that we ended with the 'death march' description from Drew.

Enough for today. We're posting a picture from yesterday since we don't have any from today uploaded at this time...a rare one of Joel (the photographer) in front of the Coliseum.

xo

Day Two -- Fully Rested

OK, nothing like a good night of solid sleep to get you back on your feet. It was Tuesday (Martedi), which was a major religious holiday here -- lot's of closed stores, including the one to get an internet connection. Anyway, on this day we packed in the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps. The latter two pretty much by mistake as we wandered along. The boys have coined our walks "Death Marches", much to the chagrin of their mother, who planned this whole trip. We just keep feeding them great Italian food and gelato and they seem to recover. Anyway, here is a pic of the family at our very nice apartment. OK, I might be sucking in my gut a bit, but being next to Calvin forced that. By the way, the weather has been stunning -- hot, but bella girornata (beautiful day).

Day One In Roma

First of all, sorry for the delay. We have no internet at our apartamento, and the "internet cafes" are few and far between. We arrived in Roma at 0700 local time. For those of you keeping score, that's 2:00 in the morning USA time. I think this picture pretty much sums things up. It was taken at 1600 local Roma time.

Knoxville Wedding

The first portion of our trip has concluded successfully, with the marriage of our nephew, Ben Dongarra, and his new bride, Amy. Since we were all gussied up for the wedding, we decided this should be our first published picture of the trip. It's now the morning after and we're sipping coffee (not be confused with cafe) in the hotel lobby. Next stop Knoxville Airport and then Roma!!

OK nothing really new

I admit there's nothing new to say, but I feel compelled to write something. To our friends and family, please feel free to share this with anyone you think would be interested. If you think no one will be, or if you yourself are not interested, please feel free to ignore. A family pic will be forthcoming, once we have some incredible Roman site as the background. Ciao.

T-minus 4 days and counting

We're four days from our epic Italy Trip departure date. I'm actually making this post simply to inaugurate our blog. This will be a first for the Sauers, so don't be expecting too many fireworks.