We woke on Tuesday October 7 ostensibly to work on our group assignment of the "Artist in Transition," or more informally, the walking tour. How were Steve, Joe and I to study for this rapidly upcoming crit? We roamed the Trastevere neighborhood trying to figure out how to live in it. Getting breakfast, a newspaper, lunch, groceries, postcards; making drawings, taking the bus, making phone calls, reading the class-assigned Blue Guide and Biography of A City and any other books found in and around our apartments and the UW Rome Center Library.

We lived life, or tried to, hoping we could make something out of it for our college experience, rather than the other way around.

I woke with a singular mission in this regard -- to find here in Rome some sort of news on my fabulous Seattle Mariners and their second-ever playoff run. With a game happening Sunday in the U.S., allowing for time zones, deadlines, and general lack of interest toward baseball in Italy, I should finally on Tuesday morning be able to locate some sort of news of how their postseason is progressing.

The answer I quickly found at a corner newsstand was that it had stopped progressing. A loss by the score of 3-1 to the Baltimore Orioles meant that the Mariners had lost this best-of-five series by three games to one and would have to wait till next year, while the Orioles would move on to the American League Championship Series.

Later that afternoon, thanks to the endless tours and walkabouts we had undergone as a group, we knew fairly well how to collect ourselves at the Piazza del Campidoglio, for a drawing class to be held in the Musei Capitolini.

First, of course, a little hidden history lesson since there's always one right in front of you in Rome. In the center of the Piazza del Campidoglio, in the center of Michelangelo's twleve-pointed inlaid stone star, is a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which, due to its rather oblong form, is informally referred to as "The Potato." Some show of respect for a former Emperor. As Paul Harvey would say, now you know ... the REST of the story!

Like most museums in Rome (or anywhere for that matter), you'd have to go there yourself to get a good idea of the vast quantity of ancient marble figureheads (the oldest public collection in the world) to have any sort of appreciation of the whole. I will try to give you a small sample of what waits there for your arrival.

The building most recently added to the Piazza by Michelangelo, in order to balance the architectural symmetry, houses the Museo Capitolino, which in turn houses a Hellenistic statue of Amore e Psiche (Eros and Psyche), which immediately made me melt like butter on popcorn when I saw it.