La Villa

As I was trying to think of something to blog about, I came across some pictures of my mission home (called "La Villa") that a recently returned mission president posted on the internet. It brought back a lot of good memories of my mission.


The Villa is on Via Cimone ('Via' meaning road, or way). It's a one-way loop in the north-eastern section of Rome. As I recall, you could take a bus from the main train station (Termini) up Via Nomentana to Piazza Sempione, then walk a short distance up Via Cimone to the Villa.


The Villa is a pretty unique building, even by Italian standards. It's one of the few buildings in Rome that has a gated courtyard (most buildings are right up next to the road). It's also probably one of a dozen buildings with a built-in basketball standard.


The Villa itself is four floors, three above ground and a basement. I never explored much in there, but when I stayed there my first 2 nights in Italy, I was in the room on the top right, with those three closed windows. I remember it was a grueling climb to the top (given the change in climate and the jetlag). There were also lots of bedrooms in the basement from what I understand.



Even the door leading into the Villa is pretty cool. It's a very heavy wooden double door. Notice the inscription above the door; I bet you can understand what it means.



The only problem with the door, as my parents and I found out, is once you get inside the outer gate you're stuck in the courtyard until somebody inside the house decides to let you out. When we visited, one of the office elders let us in the gate as he was leaving, and the mission president and his wife were taking a nap and couldn't hear us knocking. It was a long wait.



A lot of the doors in Italy are double like this (of course, neither side is very wide). You can usually fit in just using the one side, and then you can open the other side to move in furniture or whatever.
The interior changes a bit with each mission president; they bring in their own furniture, rugs, etc. (Or maybe they don't; that's just what I heard).

This picture was taken standing underneath the stairs going up. The front door is on the right. Straight ahead is, as I remember, a living room. I think it was in there that I fell asleep on the couch shortly after arriving.

The doorway to the left leads in to the dining room, and from there to the kitchen.

Notice the floors - no carpet. All the floors are done in rock over there, which looks really nice, but is really hard on your knees if you pray a lot.

Another room with a lot of memories for me is the dining room. You can see the front door through the doorway on the left, and the kitchen through the doorway on the right.

At least when I was there, the mission president's wife would always cook up a dinner for the greenies their first night in Italy. I remember not being very impressed, and extremely worried that I would go two years without enjoying a single meal.

Fortunately, the real Italians were much better cooks than the American mission president's wife.

There are other pictures, including pictures of the bathrooms, laundry rooms, and bedrooms. If you've never seen a bathroom, laundry room, or bedroom, send me an e-mail and I point you in the direction of the other pictures. They really aren't all that different from what we have here (not that any of this really was, but it was fun to write about).

It's funny that 10 1/2 years after leaving Italy I don't miss the major tourist sites. I could be happy going through the rest of my life never seeing the Colosseum again (except to take Annie there). I miss the little things that you never think to take pictures of: the little streets that you walk every day, the toilets with the tanks above eye-level (really, they're pretty strange), the vegetation growing everywhere, the cobblestone streets, and all of those other things that seem pretty normal while you're seeing them every day.