Tag: Rome
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Major Basilicas
The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur sat high atop Montmartre, as noted recently in Select City Highpoints, becoming a memorable landmark on the Parisian skyline. Setting that aside, I wondered what made a church a basilica. In the course of investigating that I learned that a basilica falls into one of several levels of significance within the…
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Misplaced Romans
The Geographic Names Information System listed 94 populated places in the United States called Rome. I figured maybe some should exist in other nations that created a bunch of new places around that same time period. Alas, I didn’t find any such places in Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. Why Rome seemed so…
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On the Steps
I clicked through television channels aimlessly the other day, a boredom-induced activity of mine. Then I came across a famous a scene from one of the Rocky movies. The hero Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) started running up the steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (map). You know the scene I’m talking about.…
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International Capitals in the USA
The capital of a nation is often its most important city, or certainly one that citizens would recognize by name if not. Place that exact name into another nation and its significance would almost always drop. I wondered if I could find the name of every other capital city within the physical boundaries of the…
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Starting from Zero
I used the Zero Milestone marker in Washington, DC as the center of my circle a few weeks ago in Odds and Ends 6. It occurred to me that maybe I’d not talked about this marker before. That seemed odd in itself. That’s because I include it on all of my DC tours for friends…
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National Capitals Closest Together
Which two national capitals are located closest together? This is another one of those tricky trivia questions designed to fool people into overlooking the obvious. Doubtless they probably think about places where countries pack tightly together, maybe Western Europe maybe Central America, perhaps forgetting about all the tiny micro-nations because those tend to fade into…