la notte bianca

Hey you guys, I'm sorry it's been so long since my last post! This past week has been INSANELY busy...but I'm updating now, even though I should be working on Latin. You should all feel very lucky :)

So, Saturday was La Notte Bianca--the night once a year that Rome stays up all night long! Shops, restaurants, museums, and basically everything else stayed open until 8 or so Sunday morning. There were concerts in the piazzas, light installations at the monuments, street performers, special museum exhibitions, fireworks and SO much more. The city was out in full force--every street was completely packed full of people! To add to the excitement, my friend Nikki came to visit that night, and after we all had dinner together, our group of thirteen (in retrospect, about seven too many) set out from the Centro around 9:30 and caught a bus into the city. Our first stop was the Circus Maximus (that's the picture at the top), where a huge light installation was covering the entire field. There were hundreds of small glowing spheres scattered across it, which would periodically change color. In all the excitement (and the pitch dark) we lost four girls in our group--unfortunately, they were the ones who knew where we were going. After vainly searching for them in the dark, we ploughed bravely onward, and found ourselves near the Arch of Constantine, face to face with an enormous praying mantis. (Yeah, you read that right.) Perched atop it were several musicians dressed in what looked like Venetian carnivale outfits and gold body glitter...this alone was worth sticking around for, we decided. Our decision would soon be rewarded when the musicians started to play some funky italian techno and a bunch of fire dancers on pogo stilts came charging down the hill toward us. After some dancing and juggling, an acrobat on a hula hoop was lowered from the head of the praying mantis and dazzled the crowd with some gravity-defying stunts, all without the use of a safety line. As if this wasn't cool enough, the praying mantis then came to life and began following the fire dancers down the Via di San Gregorio...it may have been the most ridiculous, incredible thing I've ever seen. Although it's tough to find something cooler than a giant praying mantis, we continued on in search of the Valentino exhibition at the Ara Pacis museum. But it soon became clear that our search would be fruitless; although the buses were running all night, all the main streets were blocked off...so it was impossible to find a bus. We wandered the streets for hours, stopping for drinks and headcounts, and by some stroke of luck we discovered our salvation in a lesser-known piazza: it was "I Love Green," a collection of benches topped with fresh grass where you could rest from the madness of the crowds. We grabbed some gelato (of course) and settled in for a rest. By this point it was around 2:30 am, and we were so exhausted that we couldn't imagine going anywhere but home. So we gave up on Valentino and began to make our long, long way to Termini to drop Nikki off and catch a bus back home. It was after 4 am by the time we got back to the Centro, and I was exhausted...but it was definitely worth it. After all, how many times am I going to be in Rome for la Notte Bianca?