Auguri!

Yesterday was my birthday! When I was a kid, I saw on a calendar that my birthday was also a Catholic holiday called the Assumption. I always thought that was vaguely neat, but never knew any more about it.

Well, in Italy, it is a national holiday! Apparently it celebrates when Mary was taken into heaven after her earthly life. And actually, it's not very neat to have your birthday on a national holiday in Italy because everything is closed! Literally, everything. Every store, every restaurant, every museum! Well, we found about three places open, but really Rome looked like a ghost town. It was eerie! 

We tried a few places, and ended up at the Borghese Park. This was where the kids and I wandered after the zoo looking for the metro. It's a really cool place. It used to belong to Napoleon's sister, who married into the Italian noble family Borghese. It's up on a hill, so it has fantastic views of the city.

We rented a cute little bike contraption to explore the park. It had two seats with pedals, and two kid seats in the front. It also had a canopy, which was awesome!

Monti! Haha

Borghese has its own Globe Theater!

Villa Borghese

Afterwards, there was a birthday miracle and my favorite gelateria was open! We got an amazing cake, but decided to save it for dinnertime and eat some gelato right then too. Yummmm!

I ate my own blood-orange/mango gelato and finished off Levi J's Nutella one too!

That cake was seriously amazing. For. Reals.

Quintana ate every last bite on her plate!

It would have been fun to have my pick of stores and museums on my birthday, but I still ended up with a pretty excellent day!