Gladiator

We had a roommate movie night because Erin's dad sent her some DVDs. We squeezed onto our couch together and watched it on her laptop. I've always loved it, but I appreciate it much more now than I did as an eighth grader. It's really an amazing movie... the cinematography is excellent, the characters are so well developed and well played, and it was especially significant now that I'm living in Rome. It was so cool seeing the awesome and grotesque things happen in a place I'm slowly growing familiar with. I had walked by the Colosseum on my way back to school yesterday, and Erin and I tried a new metro/bus combination on the way this morning, where the metro let us out right in front of it. There's a part where someone marvels, "And to think man created this..." The awe is still there. (It was also kind of cool picking out errors too... such as the fact that statues never lined the arches in the upper levels that serve as windows, according to Maurizio anyway. And his word is gold in my opinion.)

Speaking of Maurizio, we actually went to the Vatican in his class today. St. Peter's. Climbed the 320 stairs to the top of the cupola. Absolutely phenomenal, I'm sure I don't even have to say. I'll load my pictures later. Two of the guys in our program actually have an audience with the Pope sometime during the semester, which is also very cool.