"The Tenth Persecution Under Diocletian," from "Foxe's Book of Martyrs"

This is the section on the Diocletian Persecution, as outlined by John Foxe.  (The text is in public domain but I got these particular images from Google Books.)

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(page 44 was just the blank back of the prints)

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I wasn't loving it too much (except for the coffee, which was pretty good, actually)

When I got to Rome I started walking, looking for the church.  It was actually pretty pleasant.  It wasn't too hot, early in the day and it was kind of pleasant to walk through the streets of Rome in the early(ish) morning.   It was starting to get busy, with tourists on the sidewalks and cars in the streets, but it wasn't hard to cross the streets yet, which made things much more pleasant.  Apart from not being able to find the church quickly enough, and already being late, it didn't seem like such a bad start to the day.

One thing I noticed was that there were just as many homeless people walking around the streets, and lying in the parks and little grassy roundabouts in Rome as there were in Milan.  I was walking across one particular street, in the cross-walk, when a homeless lady started walking toward me.  There were signs up all over the train station and metro warning against pick-pockets and thieves, so I was kind of making a point of paying attention to my surroundings but I figured she was pretty safe, since she was holding a piece of pizza in each hand, and I wasn't very worried.  So, I was looking around at all of the very old buildings and somebody just ran into me.  I was startled and started to apologize.  And then I realized that the street lady had walked all the way across the street from the little roundabout just to body-check me, and then turned around and walked back to her little pull-cart of belongings on the other side of the street.  That made the whole day seem less fun.  I realize that it is probably not fair to judge all Italians on the actions of one (presumably) mentally-unbalanced homeless person.  However, in all of my travels, that was the only time I was ever attacked, even when surrounded by large groups of inebriated people, homeless people, and/or beggars (and some of the little begging children were very insistent). 

I was kind of upset by the whole "attack of the street lady" thing and when I came across a McDonalds, since I was too late to get to church, it seemed like the perfect place to get breakfast and to experience a little bit of homieness in a distressing situation.  

I will say that while I was in Europe I was very conscientious about eating in local places.  During the entire year I was gone, I only ate at an American chain restaurant once, except while I was in Italy (and that was because the Burger King was the only place serving warm food in the train station late at night while I was traveling back home).  While I was in Italy I am afraid that I ended up eating at McDonalds an awful lot.  On the other hand, as far as I could tell, that was a super-authentic Italian experience.  There were McDonalds on every street corner, practically, and they were always full.  

So, I was happy to have the opportunity to experience something like home.  I was also looking forward to having some super-fast service à la an American international corporation.  What I wasn't prepared for was how much McDonalds tailors its business model to the local community.  (If you look here, you can see some of the international foods offered in different countries.  Italy has Italian-type hamburgers.  If you scroll down a ways, you can also see the McKroket that the offer in the Netherlands--typische Nederland (just like the Dutch)!)  Well, in Italy, they really like their cafés and their coffees, so in most of the McDonalds I saw, the McCafé menu would take up two-thirds of the menu board, with the rest of the menu just squeezed into a corner.  In others (like the one I went to Sunday morning in Rome) it was like a big McCafé, with a tiny McDonalds tucked in at the side.  I was actually pretty okay with that part of the adaptations (and, I will say this, coffee in the Italian McDonalds was way better than the coffee you get in American McDonalds).  Unfortunately, another adaptation that McDonalds made was in hiring Italians and adopting a more Italian plan for time management.  When I got in line, there were three people ahead of me and it took more than half an hour to get through the line.  However, when I finally got some food (I had a giant cappuccino and a brioche, which is like a croissant that is baked with chocolate chunks inside) I went downstairs into the little basement eating area (lots of the McDonalds in Italy were on two, or even three, floors).  It was cooler down there (it had been getting progressively hotter) and I got the chance to figure out where I was in the city and how to get back to the train station and how to get to the Colosseum, which was my next stop.  I was pretty relieved.  It made for a nice, restful (and cool!) break in between all of the crazy Italians.

(If you click here you can see something about the McCafé.  It is in Italian, of course, but if you are looking at in Google, it will translate for you.  And in any case you can see what it looks like.  You can see the menu here, but it was pretty much typically Italian--you could choose combinations of coffees or cappuccinos and brioches or croissants or tortes.)

St. Paul's Within the Walls Episcopal Church (17 June 2012)

This is a Wikipedia Commons photo of the church, since I didn't get one,
but I love the stripes on it and the little blue dots and rose windows.

When I was in Rome, my plan was to go to an Anglican church on the Sunday morning.  (Anglican Churches turned out to be my go-to churches while I was traveling because they always have services in English and because they seem to often be located near big tourist centers.)  

However, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the Italians take a more relaxed approach to schedules than do the Dutch.  This lackadaisical approach extended to train, bus, and metro schedules and was quite a shock to the system.  For comparison, the Dutch Minister of Transportation got fired after heavy snowfalls disrupted train schedules in the Netherlands for too long.  In Italy, you would probably get fired for sticking to the schedule to closely--or you would run your train into the back of the train in front of you.  

In any case, after the late start from Milan, we made up some time overnight and only arrived in Rome about an hour after schedule.  It meant that I was running a bit late for church.  When you add in some confusion about the streets and things, I ended up missing church altogether.

My plan had been to go to St. Paul's Within the Walls Anglican Church, which has been having services since 1859.  It got its name, apparently, because it was the first non-Catholic church allowed to be organized in Rome, which is pretty impressive, actually.  You can see the official website here.  But if you go here you can see the facebook page (which I think you can see even without a facebook account) and if you click on the photo link, you can see a lot of pictures of the very pretty interior.

I was looking for  pictures of the church and came across this website.  It is a photography and tourism website that deals specifically with Italian churches and cathedrals.  The entry on St. Paul's Within the Walls is toward the bottom of the page but you may enjoy looking through all of the entries.  There are interior and exterior photos, as well as information about the history of the church.

More entertaining, I found a website with "Mystery Worshiper" reviews of various churches.  If you click here you can see a pretty detailed account of what it would have been like to go to church at St. Paul's Within the Walls if the trains had been a bit more prompt.

Just as interesting, I looked through the archives and found reviews of the other Anglican churches I went to while I was in Europe.  

There were loads of reviews on St. Alban's Anglican Church in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Jael and I visited (I posted about that here).  There were reviews from February 1999, November 11, 2004, August 16, 2009, and December 25, 2009.  It seemed like there were some wide variations in the quality of snacks. 

This review of St. Clement's Anglican Church in Prague, Czech Republic is from January 1, 2006, so it was almost exactly six years before I went to the church (I posted about my visit here).  I noticed that the reviewer also noticed how cold it was, except for your feet.

One of the very oddest things I noticed was that the sermons only lasted from 5-10 minutes each, with the average being about 8 minutes.  I just have to wonder what those folks would say if they accidentally wandered into one of Pastor Bradley's sermons!