This Website Might Be the Key to An Unusually Satisfying Stay in Rome

With admission to the Vatican increasingly expensive and difficult, visitors to Rome will be looking for alternate routes, in that city, for experiencing the awesome culture and artwork of Italy. I found such a guide in Katie Parla, a resident of Rome who was in New York recently to appear at the New York Times Travel Show and on the weekly radio program that my daughter and I present on wor710.com. Parla, who was an art history major at Yale, and has a Master's Degree from a university in Rome, is a growing force in tourism journalism dealing with Italy. If you will look her up in any search engine, you'll find a growing number of websites and publications for which she is responsible.
Her advice is not for the casual tourist, but for the person intensely determined to get underneath the surface of things in the main Italian cities. She mentioned, for instance, that without paying an admission charge at all, one could gaze upon great masterworks of art in the secondary churches of Rome, of which there are dozens. Superb works by Caravaggio, for instance, are found  in scattered religious structures where you can appreciate them at length and without disturbance from others. And you find the names and addresses of such churches in a website maintained by the City of Rome under the unusual address of 060608.it/en. At that address you'll also be able to input requests for information on "hop on hop off" sightseeing buses, free days of admission to museums, and numerous other important items of touristic information. That web address deserves study by visitors to Rome.
The best for last. Though I failed to get the address, I was told by Katie Parla of an extraordinary restaurant known to the smart young people of Rome, called Lazio Duro. There, she swears, you can have a complete meal -- including wine! -- for 12 euros ($15.60). I'm passing along the tip, in the hope that you can find it among the thousands of restaurants in Rome. And if any of our readers already has that information, we'd all be grateful if it could be passed along to us.
Arrivederci Roma!  What a place!