Departure for Rome imminent

This Saturday I'll be boarding a plane for Rome, where I'll be staying for 13 days. I find on the map that I'm going to be staying three blocks from "Il gerbillo furioso" - which I correctly guessed to be "The Furious Gerbil." It's a bar, and their Google rating is a respectable 4.2 out of 5 - I would probably visit regardless just based on the name.

My research led me to look up a type of pasta called "strozzapreti." Rough Guide, where I found the name, translates it as "strangled priests." That's intriguing in itself, but look closer and you'll find that it actually means "priest stranglers." That's a pretty big difference: the former suggests similarity of appearance, while the latter suggests intent ... and in fact, that's what they were designed for. (I've found no record yet of how successful they were.)

So far I have tickets for Galleria Colonna (open Saturday mornings only, the family lives upstairs) https://www.galleriacolonna.it/en/ and for Domus Aurea - Nero's home. Let me tell you it's some exciting entering your credit card into a website that's in Italian (one was English, but the other had no translation option). I have plans to visit dozens of other places, but most require less advance planning. I'm most excited to revisit Galleria Borghese which houses (among other things) the world's premier collection of Bernini sculptures. And while I'll go visit Michelangelo's Pieta in St. Peter's, what I want to see again even more is his Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli. It's a great sculpture and the photos you can find are wonderful, but what they don't tell you is what an imposing presence Moses is: he's eight feet tall, he looks pissed, and he's about to rocket out of his chair. To put it simply ... he's kind of scary. And you don't get that from photos. Or from lesser sculptors.