Gypsy Dreams of Andalucía: How far and how wide I Rome

The rest of my time in Rome was rather disorganised and scattered. On my second day there I started out late, despite having slept quite soundly until 7am. After a long hour and too many euros spent at the post office, I and one of my dormmates, Argentinian Mariana, took the train half an hour to the beach for the afternoon. At least in the area of Rome, all the beaches are cordoned off and privately operated. It seems funny to me, because the beaches aren’t half as nice as the ones in Australia, and ours come for free!

In the evening I headed over to the cocktail evening hosted by our sister hostel about 15 minutes away. It was nice to have some English speaking voices around for a while, and the British girls talked me into the following evening’s pub crawl.

Thursday I headed over to the Vatican, intending to do a walk-through on my own of everything I saw on my last visit. Unfortunately I had misunderstood how the tickets worked, so what I wanted to do wasn't possible. I regrouped over a cappuccino and instead hopped on a train to Ostia Antica, an outer Roman suburb which boasts the ruins of Ostia, the primary port of the Roman empire.

After a couple of hot, sweaty hours living in the past, I called it quits and returned to Rome for a shower and dinner before joining the hostel pub crawl. It turned out to be quite fun - everyone was making friends with everyone and there was a high proportion of Aussies there!

Despite a second late night in a row, I was up at a reasonable hour to pack my bags and clean my room ahead of my last day in Rome. As I headed out the door I ran into Bill, one of the Aussies I'd met the previous night, and he decided to tag along for what turned out to be an epic walking adventure through southern ancient Rome.

We started at the Temple of Minerva, a collapsed round building, then it was onto the Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano to check out the huge churches there, and finally a much longer trek past the Stefano Rotondo gardens and Palatine Hill to reach the Bocca della Verità, chattering and translating Latin all the way. Tuckered out, we took a bus back to the hostel, where Bill walked me and all my luggage to the station for my train to the Cinque Terre.