I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden.

Okay, I did promise you one yesterday. I didn't know Rome even had a municipal rose garden. Turns out it does, and it's on a hillside facing the back of the Palatine Hill. You know, the one with, like, the Forum on it. So you have all these roses with backdrops of things like the Baths of Septimus Severus...

Not your typical rose garden location 

Seriously unique

...plus other views back to The Vittoriano (we call it the typewriter)...

On the Capitoline Hill

...and the Presidential Palace.

The flag's the giveaway

So all that offers the opportunity for awesome shots like these:

Yellow roses 

Blooming roses 

Budding roses

Blooming and budding roses 

Flowering white roses

Dying flower and budding roses

All this makes an already photogenic city just that much more impressive.

The garden itself is a collection of single rose varieties -- hundreds of them -- but was "past its prime" with a lot of dead flowers. Worth a half an hour if you're over by, say, the famous Boca Della Verita, home of a thousand tourists and bus tours and the filming site for scene in "Roman Holiday".

You gotta be patient if you want a photo without a tourist in it

People have been stuffing their hand in its mouth since the 17th century, believing that if you tell a lie, your hand gets bitten off. I saw no blood. Must be lots of honest tourists.

Not a bad gig for a manhole cover.

That square, by the way, also hosts Rome's oldest marble structure...

The 2,400 year old Temple of Hercules Victor

...and is right beside the Cloaca Maxima, which for those of you not history buffs, is the sewer outfall from the ancient city's main sewer.

It's in there...

...and looks like that

The engineer in me finds these things interesting.

To get home, we wasted a lot of time waiting for busses and crossed the Janiculum Hill for nice views.

Portions of the Forum, looking generally south west 

The Pantheon's roof and confusion that is Rome 

The Typewriter 

The Colosseum

St. Peters

Looking to Villa Borgese & the Spanish Steps

Also up on the hill is the Fontane dell'Acqua Paola, a pretty fountain built in 1612 (but recently restored)...

Serious facade

A bit of detail

The fountain's backside. Imagine living there.

...home to a mom Mallard and her offspring.

Bath time 

Soon to be a duck

Because you can't see mallards anywhere else than Rome.

Tomorrow, we head to Sorrento for a few days, and plan on visiting Pompei, Herculaneum, Positano, the Amalfi Coast, and who knows what else.