I did do one little personal project, though: a small pilgrimage to the church of San Lazzaro ai Lebbrosi:
I had mentioned my desire to do this pilgrimage to a few Romans earlier in the week, and none of them had heard of it. I was starting to wonder if it really existed, but sure enough I was able to find a Wikipedia page describing it (Italian only), as well as a few tourist sites mentioning it. So I located it in my maps app, and headed out.
The path to get there was not terribly difficult to follow, to be honest, and it helped to have signs like this pop up along the way:
After about 20-25 minutes of walking I found myself in a narrow alley, face to face with the church. Unfortunately, it was closed! I feared it might be the case, as none of the websites I had checked gave the opening hours. I did find this on the door:
D'oh! I had missed it by just a couple of hours. And with no telephone number indicated, I had (and still have) no idea how to book a special appointment to visit. I guess it will have to wait until I get to Rome next. But at least the spiritual purpose of the pilgrimage was accomplished, and that was the most important thing.
Some of you may be wondering why I wanted to visit a church that is clearly more on the obscure end of the spectrum. Well, in a previous post I wrote about the Order of Saint Lazarus, of which I am a member. I figured there must be a church dedicated to Saint Lazarus here in Rome, because all those ancient saints seem to get a shrine of some sort here. I was right -- this church dated from the 12th century, not long after the Order was founded! So I will definitely return to get some pictures from the inside to share with my friends back home.
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