After passing out the night before, we awoke to attend Jono’s first mass as a deacon at Cheisa de Apostoli. He chose the church since St. James and St. Phillip are buried there, and his father’s patron saint was James (and is my middle name, coincidentally). He did a great job with a good, to-the-point sermon and a touching tribute to his father. The church was a unique one with lots of crystal chandeliers and tall candles around the sanctuary.
After mass… another multi-course meal! Luckily we were walking everywhere, since otherwise we may have needed extra seats on the plan back. Lunch was at Trattoria di Luigi, outside in the square. The meal is a little fuzzy here, not because it wasn’t good. I believe we had pasta carbonara, veal saltimbocca alla roma (that I’m certain of), a salad, and some gelato.
After lunch we went to Castel Sant’Angelo, one of those historic landmarks that really draws you in. I would HIGHLY recommend the audio guide though – the explanations are great, and just the right amount of information and insight to make it interesting and relevant without rambling. Too bad you have to walk half way around the whole place to get and return it!
That afternoon we stopped at a supermarket near the hotel to pick up a snack for the afternoon. Going into a supermarket was something I wanted to do while overseas, just to see the differences between the U.S. and Europe, since I work in the consumer packaged goods industry. We picked up some milk, water, Parmesan reggiano (I really wanted to just munch on a block of it while there), crackers and some chocolate cookies. We also picked up two small bottles of wine for one Euro each. We went back to our hotel room and had a little picnic. The cheese lived up to what I wanted it to be and the wine couldn’t be beat, especially considering the price. Then there were the cookies. Pavesi Togo Double Fondente. This is the closest thing that I could find to information about it online (writing these blogs has been challenging when it comes to finding links… I never would have thought that there would be such a big difference between Europe and the United States when it came to every single little restaurant and company and product having a web site). I want these again. They were chocolatey, creamy, crispy and far, far better than we were anticipating. They were next to the Oreos after all!!
While we were at lunch earlier in the day, I had hit up Jono for a dinner recommendation. We went to Hosteria Farnese in Piazza Farnesi. All the outside tables were full, so we got the one table inside, which was fine. By taking that table and dropping a few basic Italian words, we got great treatment from the wait staff and owners, showing us prime dishes as they went by out to the outside diners. We also got to enjoy the wandering musicians without having to pay any money. For the actual dinner we had gnocchi, cheese-stuffed cannelloni, some house red wine, sparkling water and a limoncello to finish. We then went over to the Trevi Fountain again to view it at night (another nasty encounter with another flower hawker that I had to yell at to get us off our backs), and then to San Crispino for gelato. We had gelato a number of times already on this trip and none of it was bad. It was all quite good actually. But this gelato was exceptionally good and the flavor unique. We each got three flavors – I had ginger cinnamon(awesome), whiskey (felt like I was doing a shot) and valrhona chocolate, while Meghan had honey (in one word, "wow"), bourbon vanilla and chocolate meringue with little crispy pieces of meringue in it.
That ended our second to last day in Rome. We headed to bed (after a stop for another glass of milk at our neighborhood bar), and rested up for our last day.