05-03-2024: A Saint and a Garden

Again, the weather forecast for today was anything but promising with rain showers much of the day. But, rain doesn’t stop us from exploring. Christine had Googled gardens in Trastevere and we learned that the Rome Botanical Garden was a 20 minute walk from our hotel. As readers of this blog know, we’re garden people and will visit gardens wherever we go. What was really convenient for our exploration today was that a church I wanted to see was on the way to the garden, so that was a perfect coincidence.

After breakfast, we checked the weather forecast again, and to our surprise, it appeared that the rain would stop by the afternoon, so a garden visit would work out well. It was raining, however, as we left the hotel in search of the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Rome. It was about a 10 minute walk, but we had to duck into the portico of a school building to take cover for a few minutes while heavy showers passed by.

The original St. Cecilia Church was built in the 4th century and supposedly is on the site of where Cecilia lived. The church has been rebuilt and added onto over the centuries, but the current main structure of the church dates back to the 12th ad 13th centuries, including the bell tower. There are two wings that house a monastery which are connected via the portico of the church. From the outside, the church is unassuming, with a small courtyard and fountain in front.

As soon as we entered the church we heard organ music, and I thought that perhaps this was piped in to add to the ambiance. But a quick look around showed a nun sitting at an organ keyboard halfway down the left side of the church. She was practicing and played several pieces while we were in the church. It was a wonderful complement to the experience of being in such a beautiful church. It added a great deal to the sacred and spiritual feel of the place. As she was finishing up her practicing just as we were about to leave, I went over to her to thank her for the beautiful music and told her how much it added to being in the church. She asked me if I was a musician and I told her I play the violin. I have come to learn that St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music and musicians.

The inside of the church is quite beautiful in an elegant sense. Because there are windows up towards the ceiling, and quite a bit of the surrounding walls and ceiling are a light color, the church seems airy.

There is a lovely sculpture of St. Cecilia. Her remains were found in 1599 during some renovations to the church and a drawing of her body, which was found intact, was made to document what had been found inside her coffin. The drawing was then used to create the sculpture of the St. Cecilia.

We then ventured down into the crypt below the church. It smelled like a musty old basement and we saw displays of items found over the centuries. There was a room containing some granaries, hole is the grand used to store grain. There were also several sarcophagi that had interesting carvings on the outside.

We then entered into a most beautiful part of the crypt, a chapel that was all poly chrome marble and mosaics. It was stunning.

I’m so glad we decided to visit this church. It was really lovely, especially with the organ music playing the whole time we were there. I’m surprised there weren’t more tourists visiting this historic church, but I’m really happy there were very few people in the church during our visit.

We then made our way to the Botanical Garden of Rome. It started raining again so we stopped into a cafe for a cappuccino. By the time we finished, the rain had stopped. That was too bad because Christine had dropped her umbrella into an umbrella stand in the cafe and forgot to pick it up when leaving. If it had been raining, she wouldn’t have forgotten it. But the sky was getting bluer and the storm clouds were moving out and the white puffy clouds were moving in.

The Botanical Garden covers 12 hectares, which is about 30 acres. The garden contains over 3,000 species of plants and trees. There are several different sections focusing on various types of plants, including a section of that includes 300 species of medicinal plants. The garden is on a slope, so it’ is somewhat of a climb up to the top, but the view is worth the climb. We strolled around the entire garden. Where we were must have been a demarcation line in the weather because we had blue skies and white clouds while central Rome experienced heavy thunderstorms and very dark skies. We felt very fortunate to have lucked out on the weather during our garden visit.

We both took a gazillion photos of all the trees and flowers. I’ll only post some of what we saw, but to say the least, it’s always so wonderful to find such an oasis after walking through narrow cobblestone streets that are loaded with people. Here we enjoyed the quiet and the serenading of many bird species. I thought I heard and glimpsed several parrots, but learned that these are actually rose-ringed parakeets. They are a large, green squawky bird and lots were roosting in the palm trees.

There was a wonderful rose garden that smelled heavenly.

One of the things we’re missing back home is our iris bed, which must be just about blooming now. So we were happy to find many species and colors of iris.

This garden has been present on the hill since the late 1880s and there were remnants of structures that were present during that period. From some of the information boards, it looked as though it was quite an attraction for the fashionable of Rome.

As I mentioned, the view from the hilltop was pretty nice. You’ll notice the dark skies over Rome and we heard lots of thunder from that vicinity. Surprisingly, we didn’t have a drop of rain during our time in the garden, and for the most part, it was sunny and warm.

There was a huge tree down that had been there for some time. We watched a bunch of kids stand inside the end of the trunk getting their pictures taken, so we did, too. Also, we noticed that someone had carved a cat from the trunk of a tree.

It was a great couple of hours in the garden. It’s a really nice place to find peace and quiet and enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature.

At some point, Christine realized she had left her umbrella in the cafe, so we thought we’d try to retrace our steps to see if we could retrieve it. The narrow windy streets of Trastevere kind of all look alike, so we had to wander around a bit. But, we found the cafe, but the umbrella bucket wasn’t there, but they had nicely stood Christine’s umbrella up in the corner, where she could retrieve it. That was a nice thing. After that, we thought we’d just stay and have lunch there.

We got back to the hotel in the late afternoon and rested for a bit. After having had a late lunch, neither of us wanted dinner, but we thought what would be nice was to return to the place we had our first lunch and get another yummy Caesar salad to share. That was just right for dinner, topped off with a shared order of Tiramisu. Yum!!

So that brings us to the end of another wonderful day in Rome.