Wednesday 18 September 2013

 Resting my feet, and waiting for the sore back to subside, the iPad and i meet for the day. I swear that it invents 90 per cent of the typos .

 Today I went to the montemartinipart of the capitoline museums,  please excuse the two words run together, it did it, i certainly did not. Perhaps i should stop and go intorno settings, to see of i can turn off predictive  text especially  in italian. I just found the check spelling option, so here is hoping. Honestly, i type it, i check it and change it and a minute later it sneakily does it again. And they say that machines save time and effort, but bring back the penny post is what the outraged historian in me is shrieking.

It took a while for the desk staff to help me discover how to get to Montemartini. It is the old power station, and you can read all about it at www.centralemontemartini.org.

When they dug up the termini area to build Termini station, which is vast, they discovered an enormous number of old roman statues, artifacts, and objects, and years after the power station was decommissioned, it was decided to use it as a museum. So there they are, all these remarkable statues, some quite gigantic, distribute amongst the old machinery. The contrast is stunning, and made me ponder human achievements and inventiveness. When i arrived there were only a few people ther and others dribbled in, but it was very quiet, although an attendant trailed around keeping a beady eye on us. A French man asked me to take his photo beside an enormous head, so i obliged, and he took a couple of me. If i had packed the camera connections I could load them, but never mind.

 Inspired by this success and the proximity of the Basilica of St Paul, i hopped on the train again and found the basilica. It is vast. My sister and I saw it on my first trip.  I look at these buildings and wonder how on earth they managed to build them. With such huge blocks of marble and granite, and I wonder how many were injured and died.

On to less cultural matters.
Last night the hotel staff member helped me buy my train ticket to florence. The  queues and the machines and how to insert the credit card were too daunting for me.
 
Last. Night i had takeaway pizza for dinner, but it was. Not very nice so I shall
 venture out again tonight, I thought about buying some wine, but here the bottles still use corks and have no corkscrew. So that put paid to that idea.

 I have had a little rest. Out I go.

But I must marvel at the train system. They arrive every few minutes, they are fast, and I ask how it is that we don't. Have such a system. Why does James Packer build a $50 million house, and want to build another - ANOTHER casino. Why does he not build a railway system and have it named after himself, then we could say we could all be Packerd in!

2 comments:

Elephant's Child said...

Looking forward to photos on your return.
Predictive text does my head in, just in English it does my head in.
I am fascinated by the thought of the statues and the machinery side by side...

Stomper Girl said...

On the ipad the prediction of the predictive text comes up as a little bubble over what you type. If you press the space bar the iPad's prediction will be automatically inserted, but you can banish the prediction by clicking the X in the prediction bubble.