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.
We took a cab to the catacombs at St. Sebastian’s (map). 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.
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.
We walked about a mile up the Appian Way to a small cafe where we continued the lessons and eventually called a cab.
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