Going to church in Italian was awesome. Todd and I loved every single minute of it. We were lucky enough to be there on Fast Sunday. The spirit was so strong. I loved singing the Hymns in Italian again and hearing all the sweet testimonies. It was such a great experience.

During the announcements in the beginning they announced the names of the branch presidency. To my amazement they said the last name of one of my mission friends, Petrolini. I looked at him and honestly didn't know if it was him or maybe his brother? But what were the chances that he and his brother would both be bald, I thought. Ha! It had been about 12 years since I had seen him, but we made eye contact and he started to kind of laugh, and I knew then it was him. He was a great missionary, we both served in Catania, and he helped me more than once during my time there.  He is Italian, so we never had the best communication between us, since my Italian was never great, but he was a great guy. We went up to him after the meeting was over and caught up and reminisced. There is something so special about seeing old mission friends. I imagine heaven will be very similar.
 

After church was over we went to catch a cab at the local Taxi stand so we could try to get a peek at the Rome temple that is being currently being built. When we walked over to the taxi stand there was our taxi driver from the morning waving at us! We were laughing pretty hard when we got in the car and he started up with his funny antics again.

We told him the address that we wanted to go to and he was shocked we wanted to go so far out of the city. We finally got to the temple sight, and it was so unbelievable and wonderful to see the temple being built. When we were missionaries we knew that the church owned the land for a temple in Rome, but honestly thought the day when a temple would be built would be far, far in the future. When the Rome temple was announced Todd and I cried tears of joy knowing that the Saints we loved so much in Italy and Malta would now have a temple of their own! So incredible. It is going to be absolutely beautiful and such a blessing for Italy. We loved standing outside the gates and admiring it. It was a great moment for both of us.


After seeing the temple we headed back to the heart of Rome to our hotel. Our taxi driver was hilarious and chatted with us the whole way. He was curious about the temple so Todd started to tell him a little about the church. We became actually pretty good friends with this guy, and he and Todd exchanged email addresses and phone numbers and we asked if we could have Mormon missionaries call him up, and he agreed. Pretty dang cool. I am telling you, missionary work is always in your bones.

We went back to the hotel and called the boys and chatted for a bit, changed our clothes and then headed out to see the Colosseum and the Roman Forum.

We first stopped and had lunch at the most nasty tourist trap of a restaurant!  We were lured in by the convenience to the Colosseum and the view, but it really wasn't worth it. These places are so generic and over priced. They actually had frozen pizzas.  I am dead serious. Frozen pizzas in Italy. Wow.

We headed over to the Colosseum and Forum area and decided to go through the Forum first. On our walk over we stopped in front of the colosseo and took this picture...


We then popped in our ear buds and listened to the Rick Steves' guided auto tour of the forum as we walked through it. It was super interesting and a lot of fun. We both love this kind of stuff and it was great just to walk through listening, learning a ton, and being together.

This arch was fascinating and what is so crazy is that it was built by jewish slaves back when the Romans took over Jerusalem. They had to literally carve into this arch the history of their people being conquered. So sad.



Looking at this old ruins and hearing that they used to be covered in marble and so lavish and elegant was pretty cool to see. You can really start to visualize how it might have looked.





It was so cool to hear the various stories about Julius Caesar and ancient Roman life. It is pretty crazy to think that this massive, powerful civilization rose to power and then became completely obsolete.


The picture below are the ruins of the house of the Vestals.  The Romans had these vestals virgins who were like basically priestesses or nuns. They all lived here in this residence, took an oath of chastity, and were keepers of the special fire. They were treated special and were held in very high esteem. The also had special seats in the Colosseum on the same level as the Emperor.


After we got done roaming through the Forum and listening to our auto tour, we headed over to the Colosseum.

We continued listening to our ol' friend Rick Steves' as we took a little tour through the Colosseum.

I really loved learning about the temple of Venus, which is seen from the Colosseum, that you can kinda see in the picture below. This temple used to house statues of Roma (the goddess of Rome) and Venus (the goddess of love). Roma spelled backwards is amor, which is love in Latin. Very cute and clever! It's been a popular place for lovers to go and people still often get married there or in the church behind it now. Ahhhhh! Romanitical. We were feeling the love here...


All that touring made us hungry again and we decided it was time for dinner!  We took a cab over to the Trevi fountain area, and found a great side street pizzeria for dinner. Unlike lunch, this place was authentic and delicious. We were happy.

After dinner we walked over to the Trevi fountain to see it one more time before leaving Rome tomorrow. Geez, it really is one of my all time favorites!



We grabbed a taxi and took it back to the hotel kinda early, we are tired and we have to get up kinda early tomorrow morning to catch our train to Venice! I am SUPER excited to see Venice, I have never been! We have had SO much fun in Rome. I love Rome. I feel like Rome gets a bad rep being kinda chaotic and random, but I just love it. I love the people, the sights, the food, and the feel. I cannot say how wonderful it has been being here with Todd. We have so loved having this alone time together.

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