Pompeii Today: Bill Jennings

Casa at 6pm

Here's my favorite photo from my visit to the Casa la Salle last year.

I love the fact that we're all so hard at work. I think we were reading Horace in Latin. Notice that it's 6 pm, and we're all getting a little bit hungry, and it's the perfect time to break for a nice meal, and yet... here we are.

About those art magazines that you can see in the foreground: they're part of a great "Art Dossier" series of inexpensive floppy paperbacks published by Giunti. Each one cost € 3.90, which is something like $5. I picked them up at the Galleria Borghese, which I had visited during our afternoon siesta.

(I wrote about the Casa yesterday.)

At the Casa

Last summer I travelled to Italy with a pack of other Latin teachers. Our homebase for our three weeks in Rome was the Casa la Salle, a guest house run by the Christian Brothers. Although the Casa is a private retreat on the outskirts of Rome, it's still only half a block away from a Metro train stop (which only opened in 2000). The best of both worlds.

I have reservations at the Casa again this summer. It's very affordable, and they have internet connections in many of the guest rooms, which will be exactly what I need.

I've assembled some resources for the Casa:

• Here's a good map showing the Casa's location in connection to Rome. As you can see, it's a good distance east of the Vatican -- definitely walkable, if you want to see the city on foot.


• Here's a map detail showing how close the Casa is to the Cornelia Metro stop.


• Here are directions to the Casa for those arriving from the airport.