Day 7- Free Day #7

Yay for a day of sleeping in! Today we had planned on visiting a museum called the Crypto Balbi (mostly because it was free). When we headed out there we found out that we had to wait at least and hour to have an escorted tour. So we decided to walk around until we could get in. We headed south towards the river and stumbled on the Fountain of Tortoises which is a fountain with turtles on it… no way! The turtles were probably added later by Bernini but that is just speculation.

We then walked towards the Theater of Marcello which is a theater built by Augustus in 23 B.C. and is near the river. On the way there we walked through the Jewish Ghetto (accidentally) and stumbled on the Portico of Octavia which was also built by Augustus for his sister. We walked through the archeological area and then found the theater we were looking for.

We were close to the river and so we decided to walk towards it and we stumbled on a little church, called Saint Nicholas in Prison, next to the theater with exposed columns that were obviously old. We stopped in and found out we could see some remains below the church. Problem was that the tour was in Italian. However, the couple that toured with us spoke Italian and English and so they translated for us.

Turns our that this church is built over the remains of 3 pagan temples! The site has been closed for the last 3 years for excavations and so our professor had not even seen the site before. The 3 temples (from South to North) were the Temple of Hope, the Temple to Juno (the goddess of war and wife of Jupiter), and the Temple to Janus (a two faced god and the oldest temple from roughly 200 B.C.E.). It was so cool! There were also remains of the original streets that ran in between the temples and little cubbies that housed money changers in the day.

The original church was built in 600-700 C.E. but none of that church remains. However, the church was rebuilt in the 1500's. We noticed some holes in the ceiling (the floor of the church) that were boarded off and the tour guide told us that the holes were from when the church used to place their dead under the church. Supposedly they would just drop the bodies down into the hole because many could not afford a proper burial. Some of the bones are still down in the pit and we were able to see them.

In the upstairs of the church there are a bunch of columns that were taken from other temples and churches to build the 1500's church (so none of them matched). On one of the columns was an inscription probably from the 1100's that details a priest's donations to the church and all he asks is that he be buried at the base of the column. But the rest of the story was lost in translation. Overall, it a very cool find!

Then we headed back to the Crypto Balbi and toured that. It was really hard to figure out what was going on there and it was not very interesting… oh well. After that we went back to the hotel and relaxed for the rest of the evening.