January 14

This was a busy day. We got up to meet Fr. Josh at St. Peter’s at 6:50am. They didn’t open the security line until 6:45 and it took a while, so we were running late. Luckily for us, Fr. Josh was too. He brought a friend, Deacon Adam from Pittsburgh. They vested and then we walked around St. Peter’s looking for a side-chapel altar that was free. The first free one we came to was St. Petronella, so there we were. We had a very special Mass with the 7 of us, Fr. Josh & Deacon Adam. We could hear murmurs of other Masses going on around us. It was very peaceful and wonderful.

Here is a picture of St. Peter’s Square early in the morning.

After Mass we went home for breakfast and met up with Vanessa & her son. Our family and the two of them went to San Clemente. First we stopped for a photo op in front of the Coloseo. Vanessa & I have known each other since I moved to Baltimore in 1994. She was a social worker on the inpatient unit I spent some of my internship working on. She & I also baked Christmas cookies together for several years until she moved out of the area. It was great to catch up, since we hadn’t seen each other in 8 years.

No pictures allowed in the church. But, San Clemente is like a history lesson in one place. They have a scavi which has a medeival church on top of a 4th century church on top of a temple on top of a Roman home. The tomb of St. Cyril is there too! It was amazing.

Below you can see what is all around Rome. There are excavations like this everywhere. No signs, just outlines of what would have been there.

Picture of a metro train. We used the metro quite a lot. We were conveniently located quite close to a stop.

We went home to rest and eat lunch after saying goodbye to Vanessa.

Then, we walked 1.3 miles to the Trastevere area of Rome where we met Sara. Mark & I met Sara 21 years ago when she was a teenager and we were working with the youth group. We quickly became friends with the whole family. Sara has been living and studying in Rome for 10 years! She graciously offered to show us around Trastevere and I’m glad she did. It’s the most maze-like part of Rome we went in with all these little streets going off every which way.

Our first stop was Santa Maria in Trastevere. I can’t remember a lot about it, maybe Marty remembered more. It was a neat church. Then we went by where Sara lives and works. She and her roommate live at a retirement home. They help out in exchange for the room and it works out well. The home had an illustrious history, which is told in the plaque below.

We went to the church where St. Benedict had a room and we went to St. Cecilia’s where she is buried. The statue was made by someone 1000 years after she was buried. They exhumed her body and found she was incorruptible so the sculptor viewed her body and made the statue. Incredible!

We had an unfashionably early, by Rome standards, dinner. It was raining and we were all tired. As usual, the food was delicious. Charlie may have eaten more on this trip than he ate the entire month before!

Earlier this is us walking around. See how narrow the streets are?

Walking home by the river in the rain. It was pretty, but we were all tired. This was one of the longest days we had for walking. My pedometer said 27,601 steps.