Without Lifting A Finger

 Rome. St. Peter's Square. #rlswihart13 @rl_swihart #rome #stpeters #square #piazza #views #travel #art #architecture #michelangelo #bernini #poetry #ReadMore #woodhenge #matmantestudo #freeebooks #amazon

Tried two other Melville novels (couldn't get into them). Will attempt The Whale (read some of it years ago but never finished) some other day. Moved to Hawthorne: Travel Journals and a few short stories that supposedly zoom in on the sin-factor. * Travel Journals: From one of Hawthorne's visits to St. Peter's (I remember this mosaic): To-day I walked out along the Pincian Hill. . . . . As the clouds still threatened rain, I deemed it my safest course to go to St. Peter's for refuge. Heavy and dull as the day was, the effect of this great world of a church was still brilliant in the interior, as if it had a sunshine of its own, as well as its own temperature; and, by and by, the sunshine of the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi ( Fountain of the Four Rivers ) is a fountain in the Piazza Navona in Rome , Italy. It was designed in 1651 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Innocent X whose family palace, the Palazzo Pamphili , faced onto the piazza as did the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone of which Innocent was the sponsor. The base of the fountain is a basin from the centre of which travertine rocks rise to support four river gods and above them, an ancient Egyptian obelisk surmounted with the Pamphili family emblem of a dove with an olive twig. Collectively, they represent four major rivers of the four continents through which papal authority had spread: the Nile representing Africa, the Danube representing Europe, the Ganges representing Asia, and the Río de la Plata representing America. [From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontana_dei_Quattro_Fiumi ]

                                  



        



                  



Laocoön ( / l eɪ ˈ ɒ k ɵ . ɒ n / ; Ancient Greek : Λαοκόων , IPA:  [laokóɔːn] ), the son of Acoetes , is a figure in Greek and Roman mythology and the Epic Cycle . [ 1 ] He was a Trojan priest who was attacked, with his two sons, by giant serpents sent by the gods. Though not mentioned by Homer , the story of Laocoön had been the subject of a tragedy, now lost, by Sophocles and was mentioned by other Greek writers, though the events around the attack by the serpents vary considerably. The most famous account of these is now in Virgil 's Aeneid where Laocoön was a priest of Poseidon (or Neptune for the Romans), who was killed with both his sons after attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse by striking it with a spear. [ 2 ] Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line " Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs ", or "Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts." This line is

                                                                 

Early one morning I saw another obelisk at the end of the street. Had to follow that thread. *                               

We strove with all the others (Italian youngsters treating her like a hip-hop star), wanting to see only her. A young priest sat staring in silence, seemingly anxious for the souvenir hunters to leave. *