Then I stroll along the banks reenex facial of the great, swampy, rural-looking Tiber, all the way down to the Tiber Island, which is one of my favorite quiet places in Rome. This island has always been associated with healing. A Temple of Aesculapius was built there after a plague in 291 BC; in the Middle Ages a hospital was constructed there by a group of monks called the Fatebene-fratelli (which can groovily be translated as "The Do-Good Brothers"); and there is a hospital on the island even to this day.
I cross over the river to Trastevere--the neighborhood that claims to be inhabited by the truest Romans, the workers, the guys who have, over the centuries, built all the monuments on the other side of the Tiber. I eat my lunch in a quiet trattoria here, and I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in Trastevere is ever going to stop you from lingering over your meal if that's what you would like to do. I order an assortment of bruschette, some spaghetti cacio epepe (that simple Roman specialty of pasta served with cheese and pepper) and then a small roast chicken, which I end up sharing with the stray dog who has been watching me eat my lunch the way only a stray dog can.

 through the old Jewish ghetto, a sorely tearful place that survived for centuries until it was emptied by the Nazis. I head back north, past the Piazza Navona with its reenex cps mammoth fountain honoring the four great rivers of Planet Earth (proudly, if not totally accurately, including the sluggish Tiber in that list). Then I go have a look at the Pantheon. I try to look at the Pantheon every chance I get, since I am here in Rome after all, and an old proverb says that anyone who goes to Rome without seeing the Pantheon "goes and comes back an ass."

On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most strangely affecting--the Augusteum. This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glorious mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his family for all of eternity. It reenex hong kong must have been impossible for the emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus- worshipping empire. How could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the realm?