Tivoli and Villa Adrianna

Yesterday we headed out of the city to Tivoli.

Its where popes and other important people such as the Emporer Hadrian had country villas. The town its self is situated on top of a hill with nice views out over the countryside.
We first visited Villa de'Este, were Cardinal de'Este lived. The house was lovely with painted walls in every room and very elaborate ceilings. Its the gardens which the villa is really famous for. They are more a series of fountains connected with paths and plants than gardens, every corner you urn is another fountain!!! They were really impressive and there was even a musical fountain that has a waterpowered organ inside. Most of the fountains have beautiful statues of Roman god and godesses in them which was a bit confusing as the garden was built in the 15 somethings!!!! it was quite intereesting ctuallyhow they keept copying the roman statues and paiteings, inside the house there were two rooms depecting Heracles (whom the Este family claim to descend from) and other roman gods, then right next door was rooms depecting Noah and Moses, and this is the house of a Cardinal who still has roman gods everywhere!!!!

The town of Tivoli was cute with a nice piazza in the center where we had lunch, yummy pizza from a shop that had about 20 different flavours!!!

After lunch we headed down the hill to Villa Adrianna, (Hadrians Villa). Hadrian was emporor in about the 200s AD so all the ruins there were really old but actually quite well preserved. The place was massive. we got a bit lost at first in the olive groves adn couldnet see any ruins then we found them and were amazed! there were really well perserved mosaic floos and loads of bits of columns lying all around the place, it was quite funny reading the information boards, each of the areas is called by a name but it seems that later archiologiest disagree with that naming so at each board it seemed to say 'the so called Latin library' or something like that.

We caught the bus back into Rome and made ourselves pasta again!!! mmm they have some quite random food here in the supermarket, we brought chocolate filled croussants for lunch and bread and salami.