With our accomodation so close to the Pantheon we were able to see the queues from our window - and at 9am they were non existant so we headed out for a walk through. I was expecting the inside to be more rustic (like the outside) in appearance - but it isn't. It was very ornate with lots of polished marble. The domed ceiling is an impressive feat of engineering, and the sheer size of the columns outside are also staggering.

We headed off for a walk around some more ruins (the Roman Forum) and up Capitole Hill, where we encountered an Italian protest about the lack of spending on the Italian infrastructure. We hastily made our way through the throngs of people and found an Italian restaurant off the tourist track for a lunch of pasta and pizza with April the odd one out trying some poultry.
We split up on the way back, Darryl and April finding an amazing church on the way back - with an interior they said was more impressive than the inside of the Pantheon, the rest of us just window shopping.
After a siesta we headed back out again - this time to a Church of Capuchin Monks that contained a Monestry and a Crypt. The crypt contained the bones of 3,700 Monks, arranged into decorative pictures and scenes. The "artwork" was created in the 1700's and depicts the Monks' perception of death pictorially. Some of the things we saw were a skeleton holding a scythe and scales (judgement), a clock made up of only finger bones (and no hands!) representing eternity. There were also some entire skeletons cloaked in Monk robes, some even looked like they still had skin on their faces - not just bare skulls. In other places pieces of bone were placed in decoratives patterns like a floral designs - all made just with bones. It was quite unusual - some might say a little creepy, depending on your views of human remains. No photos were allowed - we will have to download one from the Internet to include in the blog as it really needs a picture.

Our next stop was the Spanish Steps: Darryl had been reading one of the Rome trip guides that a bit harshly identified these as really tourist nonsense. They start nowhere particular and lead to nowhere, but the tourists flock there to say they have been, so we thought we should too...even funnier that at this location Darryl gets cornered into buying flowers for his wife and daughters by a savvy street vendor - I bet there's not many women that turn down being handed a red rose! On the bright side as well as selling us roses he did take a nice family photo of us - so now we have a nice momento of our time at the top of the Spanish Steps to no-where!!

We headed back, stopping at a few shops, Sarah looking for clothes and April desperate to find an English copy of a newly released book, the final book in a series that she has been waiting 6 months for. A glimmer of hope as we found an Anglo-American Bookshop that said it might be in on Monday! Hopefully just in time to read on the long plane ride home.

From a purchasing perspective today, we had a high and a low - Sarah managed to buy the best value item of our trip: a pair of jeans for only 3 Euros. (They were on sale - we thought it was going to be 6 Euros, 3 was incredible).
Scott managed the worst value item of our trip - a pencil for 2.5 Euros that he bought where we saw the bones. No wonder it didn't have a price on it!

April: Fingers crossed for my book. We've tried every bookshop I could find.
Scott: The bones were cool. The people were a lot smaller then which is why the skeletons were small.