Visiting Rome

Less Obvious Sites in Rome

When you visit Rome in the summer, it seems that everyone is there. So, here are some interesting places I visited that weren't necessarily the typical tourist spots. Yes, the two Papal basilicas had bus loads of tourists marching through, but they spent surprisingly little time inside.

As for the Mithraeum, it was fascinating, lightly visited, and it was wonderfully cool on a hot day.

Next in Rome:

Basilica of Saint Clement
A First-Century Mithraeum, a temple for rituals of the Mithraic Mysteries, beneath two layers of subsequent Christian churches

Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran
Locally called San Giovanni in Laterano, this, and not Saint Peter's in the Vatican, is the Pope's seat as the Bishop of Rome, and the Popes lived in the adjacent palace until the Middle Ages
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Basilica of Saint Mary the Great
Locally called Santa Maria Maggiore, this is one of Rome's four patriarchal basilicas
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Where Next In Italy?
🚧 = under construction

In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to scan cuneiform tablets to archive and share 3-D data sets, providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them. I worked on the project with Gordon Young, at the time Purdue University's only professor of archaeology. Gordon was really smart, he could read both Akkadian and Sumerian, and at least some of other ancient languages written in the cuneiform script. He told me to go to Italy, "The further south, the better."

Gordon was right. Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome, but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system that runs overnight sleepers all the way to Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners of Sicily.

So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order, as they should be.

International travel