Roma was beautiful.

Only 2h50 away from Glasgow on Ryanair and we were in the sunshine along with 5 billion other tourists with their cameras. So much for travel photography as a career. There is no way I could get a photo of an enormous building, without at least a score of tourists stepping right out in front of me.

Boy did we have a good time though. The food. Oh dear, the food. I think we are both pasta’d out after three full days of it. Pasta, pizza, lamb, artichokes, spinach, tiramisu, gelato…. and then again, pasta, pizza, lamb, artichokes, spinach, tiramisu, gelato… with a little bit of walking in-between.

I think the highlight of my trip was prosciutto wrapped around a piece of fresh mozzarella, followed by a pizza topped with mozzarella, prosciutto and arugula followed by penne with pine nuts, zucchini and pecorino cheese and blood orange gelato as a desert! Lunch.

Seriously though, we really enjoyed the Trastavere district of Rome. There were still lots of tourists, but it was village like in atmosphere and actually quite a few locals hanging out in the cafes after church on Sunday morning.

We did an open top bus tour which was a waste of time. Rented a guide at the Colosseum which was a brilliant idea. He was Roman, cute and really funny. The stereotypical Italian, very proud and just a hint (!) of chauvinism. A particularly poignant pearl was his comment to an english woman talking about food “yes, we know how popular the english food is, how many english restaurants are there around the world again?”. She was understandly a bit miffed, but then again, how much truth is there in that? Although you could pretty well say the same for Australian, Canadian and
American, couldn’t you?

We made our own tours of most of the other sites, with short breaks in the big piazzas for wine or coffee (alternating) throughout the day.

The Sistine chapel was another highlight. The first time I had ever been there was in 1989 and it was being restored so we never saw the whole thing. It really is amazing – although have you ever noticed that the women that Michelangelo paints all have the same muscly bodies as the men, only with female heads – seemingly added as an afterthought??

We visited the ghetto, the student quarter, old Rome, new Rome, sleazy Rome – the only really significant omission was shopping. We did go to the Porta Portese, the biggest flea market in town, but amazingly enough – we bought nothing…. incredible huh? We could almost be called “the thrifty travelers”!

We stayed in a very cheap hotel near the termini station called Planet 29. It was cheap, clean, quiet and quite well located. Did I mention cheap? Actually despite my hesitancy to stay nearby the train station (as it is usually always the seediest part of town) it turned out quite well. It was handy to the airport transfer bus drop off and pick up, which meant we didn’t have to traipse our luggage around the city both on arrival and departure – and it was far enough away from the train station to not be full of dodgy characters. All in all we were quite pleased with it. We had our own balcony and a shared terrace, clean bathroom with fabulous water pressure, the only so-so feature was the mattress, I tended to sink into the middle, it felt more like mud than a mattress, although after walking 25 miles each day – it was barely noticeable!

3 days is never enough, but certainly well worth it. Next time I’d like to take the train out to the beach, for some reason I just can’t imagine Romans at the seaside….

You can see all our Photos here…