Rome

Laetitia was off to Rome for a week with her work, so we stole the opportunity to head out for the weekend before and enjoy a sight seeing city break…

The idea was made even more attractive when we realised we could snag a posh city centre hotel for free using hotel reward points. I guess there has to be some benefits to working away from home so often!

The late Friday evening flight to Rome from Manchester was a pain going via Brussels, as there are no direct flights to Rome! How does Manchester airport survive as a business hub? I guess it doesn’t, I guess it’s primarily a holiday destination oriented airport with flights mainly going to hot-spots in the Mediterranean etc.

Anyway, we started our first full day with an ambitious walking plan taking in a long list of world famous landmarks.

First off though was finding breakfast. We found a nice cafe – a pastry, an omelette, and amazing Italian coffee set us up!

• Spanish Steps – busy – great views over the city.
• Trevi Fountain – even busier!
• Pantheon – an impressive building that is really quite tough to photograph.
• Piazza Navona – there are lots of piazzas! This one was one of the most impressive. Plus we had a street artist blowing clouds of bubbles to enhance the scene.
• Vatican City & St Peter’s Square– maybe the focal point for Rome sight seeing. Certainly more so for Catholics. Either way, as an atheist, it is impossible to deny that it is utterly amazing architecture!
• Vatican Museum – a seemingly endless procession through numerous rooms full of artefacts! The initial rooms are basically filled with what amounts to stolen Egyptian artefacts. I couldn’t help feeling they would better returned to Egypt. However, after that the style changed and focussed on rooms where the actually decoration and architecture of the room itself was the showpiece. These were amazing and culminated with the Sistine Chapel (no photography allowed) and Michelangelo’s painting of The Creation of Adam. The painting is quite far away – the ceiling is high – so at first I thought, “OK it’s good but not really worth the fuss”. Then I borrowed Laetitia’s glasses for a moment. These worked like mini-binoculars for me and were a revelation. The detail in the picture is breath taking. It’s such a shame everyone can’t get close.
• St Peter’s Basilica – at the end of our walk we just had enough stamina left to take a quick peek inside St Peter’s. Think what you like about churches, religion, and Catholicism (esp. at the mo’ with all the scandals etc.), this is one hell of an amazing building. It beggars belief how mankind embarks on an engineering project that took over one hundred years to complete. Leaving aside how it was paid for!

Our first evening was a special dinning event, we went to Villa Laetitia and the Michelin starred Enoteca La Torre restaurant.

Our feet were absolutely knackered from day one’s trekking. Not only had we managed to cover an awful lot of ground, Rome’s streets are almost entirely paved with cobbles. The uneven surface helped ensure my feet were totally cooked!

So day two’s itinerary was a little less ambitious…

• Colosseum – as luck (or not) would have it we visited the Colosseum on the first Sunday of the month – free entry day. However, this ensured that the queue to enter was enormous and looped all the way around the building, taking us about an hour and a half navigate! The Colosseum is with justification world famous, and yet another utterly amazing building. Perhaps it’s a shame that its original purpose was basically carnage! Thousands – no exaggeration – thousands of animals would be killed at events held here! Not to mention the many human gladiators that also perished.
• Roman Forum – we strolled past, but not through (once you’ve seen a few ancient ruins you can only take so much) the Roman Forum area.
• Piazza Venezia & Trajan’s Column – pretty much the centre of Rome and an impressive place – home to a truly monumental “tomb of the unknown soldier”!

Dinner on Sunday evening was considerably less expensive, but not necessarily any less fun! We found a traditional Italian pizzeria. With beer. Yummy!