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.

The roof of Santa Maria church

Statue of Athena in Ostia Antica

Roman amphitheatre!

Vittorio Emmanuele II by night

Egyptian obelisk in Rome

The Bocca della Verita!

Bill and I testing our truthfulness

Day 1 - Getting lost in Rome

So I started my trip by landing in Rome at 6.30 in the morning. I'm still amazed that I was smart enough to spoil myself with two weeks in Italy to begin my adventures. I'd forgotten how much I like this city, and this country. Rome is one of my favourite places to be - not one of my favourite cities, one of that handful of special places that I fell in love with - but one of my favourite places to visit. I could quite happily spend the rest of my life dropping by Rome - never actually spending so much as a whole week here and seeing all the sites, but simply taking a day or two here and there and just wandering through the streets. Rome is beautiful like that.

I checked into my hostel and changed into shorts first thing. It's 30-something degrees and very sunny here in Rome, almost unbearably hot for being outdoors. I headed out again to go to the bank and electronics shop - neither my European bank card nor my camera are working, so all photos in today's post are courtesy of my smartphone (until I get everything working again).

Even though I ate on the plane, I love Italian food, so I stopped into a cafe for a proper Italian breakfast. A cornetto a la crema is like a croissant filled with lemon cream, and with a top-notch small cappucino and some fresh pulpy orange juice, it's only €3,50. From there I caught the metro north from Roma Termini station up to Piazza Espagna, where the Spanish Steps are. There's a fountain in front of the steps, and turns out you can drink from it, so I queued up to have a mouthful of fresh, clear Italian water.

Spanish Steps

The fountain

Drinking from it

From there I meanderingly zig-zagged my way south, stopping at churches, palaces, obelisks, and a 50% off bikini sale (hey, if you were this hard to fit into undergarments then you'd be excited about cute new bathers too). Eventually I ended up at the Pantheon again, where I bought water and mint gelato for lunch.

The Pantheon exterior

From the Pantheon I wended a slow way back towards the hostel to walk off the gelato, since it was much hotter than my body was used to and I hadn't had much sleep since leaving Australia, so I was probably more tired than I felt. The girls in my hostel room have all been great - me, an Argentinian, a Brazilian and a Russian - so we all decided to stay in to chat and have an early night. I completely conked out around 11, so I think it's safe to say the jet lag hit!

One of the streets off Via del Corso

Obelisk!

I see this everywhere and I love it - 'SPQR' is an acronym for the Latin 'Senatus populusque romani' - the senate and people of Rome.