We got to sleep in a bit this morning, as we met up with today’s tour guide, Julia, at 10am at our hotel. Julia is a Brit who moved to Rome from Kent when she was 19. She chose Rome by throwing a dart at a map (really!). The dart landed on a small town about 150km north of Rome – she figured that wouldn’t be any fun, so she moved the dart to the biggest city around. So she moved to Rome without knowing any Italian and without a job. I guess it worked out okay, because 8 years later she’s fluent in the language, the culture and the history.<\/p>\n
We took a cab to the catacombs at St. Sebastian’s (map)<\/a>. These were the original catacombs where the name comes from (“catacomb” means literally “near the hollow”, which is where we were). Though you need to go through the catacombs with a tourguide from St. Sebastian’s, it was great having Julia along with us. Before we went in she gave us a great overview of what we’d see, and she filled in a lot of information during the tour. The local guide was hard to understand, it sounded like he learned english from the Microsoft computer voice – like someone typed in the tour monologue and he memorized the computer-read version of it. Unfortunately you’re not allowed to take pictures down there, so we don’t have anything to put up here. Basically it was a 20 minute walk through hand-dug caves with various areas for putting the bodies (there are five different way’s they’d put the dead in there). The areas we went through were devoid of the dead – all rock, no bones – so if you want to see rows of skeletons like we all imaging catacombs to be like you’re out of luck. Very cool nonetheless.<\/p>\n Afterwards we sat outside with Julia and got a history of Christianity that was fascinating. She was happy and comfortable separating history and faith, and was clearly someone who loves storytelling.<\/p>\n We walked about a mile up the Appian Way to a small cafe where we continued the lessons and eventually called a cab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We got to sleep in a bit this morning, as we met up with today’s tour guide, Julia, at 10am at our hotel. Julia is a Brit who moved to Rome from Kent when she was 19. She chose Rome by throwing a dart at a map (really!). The dart landed on a small town […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[129,142],"tags":[127],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-italy","category-jun-16-07","tag-rome","category-129-id","category-142-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430,"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anirama.com\/travelogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}