John Dunphy & wife Rebecca Allen enjoy Trevi Fountain, cafe in Rome

Dunphy enjoying Rome

Former BJ reporter John Dunphy, retired from the Orange County (California) Register, is enjoying Rome with wife Rebecca Allen, who spent a lot of years as deputy Features editor at the same newspaper.

Writes John:

“Rome's famed Trevi fountain was all fenced in and dry, looking more like a shipwreck than art. But we had a great walk around the area. Next was the Vatican tour which was great, but bit too long for these old feet. Nothing a cold glass of wine couldn't cure. Stay tuned...”

Rebecca chimed in:

 “We had a 5-hour tour of the Vatican museums and the St. Peter's basilica today. The weather was perfectly sunny and breezy. After we got back to the hotel to have lunch and rest our aching feet, thunder and lightning crashed through the sky and a wonderful downpour cleaned the air. We must be doing something right! Sorry for the delay on letting you know we arrive safely. We couldn't figure out how to use our international data plan at first.”

The Trevi Fountain was constructed around 19 BC by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, son-in-law and favorite general of Emperor Octavian Augustus, to supply the thermal baths he built in the Campus Martius, by the Pantheon. The display spilling water was on the site of the Church of St. Ignatius.

In 2006 when Paula and I visited the Trevi Fountain an Italian policeman blew his whistle vigorously when I dunked my bare feet in the swirling waters. It was part of our 15-day bus tour of Italy, from Venice to the Isle of Capri, before we headed for my heritage. That’s my hand around Paula behind the photo of Dunphy sitting at a Rome café outside table in the montage above.

I walked through the 1884 stone house where my grandmother grew up, and slept in one bedroom with seven other family members, in Mione, a 2-block-by-3-block hamlet in the foothills of the Alps. And later we drove about 20 miles southwest to Pellizzano, today a whitewater rafting tourist attraction, where my mother, grandfather, aunt and uncle were born.

They all came to America by 1920, and wound up in Fairmont, West Virginia, where my mother met my Monongah coal mining father, whose family came to America from Mogilno, Poland and got to West Virginia after trying their luck in Pennsylvania and Michigan.