Rome, Italy, Day 1
The flight we were taking from Madrid to Rome was scheduled at 6.50am. With a 30 minute taxi to the airport, this meant 4am wakeup calls! We did make it with plenty of time, and managed to enjoy the full EasyJet experience: horrendous boarding process, scrabbling for seats once onboard and Katie’s luggage didn’t come out on the belt in Rome! After having a mild panic attack, they sent someone down and found it caught on the belt underneath. Phew! All the same, can’t say we are looking forward to our next flight with them out of Milan.
We did make it to Rome’s Ciampino airport (the Italian Avalon, basically) in one piece though, and managed to find the one bus driver trying to set a record for ‘the number of people on one bus in 35C heat’. Think he gave up after about sixty-odd - he couldn’t work out how to fit the pram into the human Tetris grid we had become. One sardine bus and dodgy metro train later and we checked into Hotel Panda, a cute little pension on a more quiet Via della Croce, very close to the Spanish Steps and the Trevi fountain. It’s a great location with little pizza and bouteque shops all along. The room itself is very nice with a small loft and roman style sculpture.
Dropping our luggage, we set out on the cobblestoned streets and found some lunch: being quite original, it was pizza straight up :) We then climbed the Spanish steps and made our way to the beautiful Trevi fountain and its not-so-beautiful crowds. Some more wandering through plazas filled with columns, fountains and statues and we found ourselves at the Pantheon. This is an amazing building, obviously built to the Roman gods, but now a Catholic basilica.
This was enough walking for a while, so we tracked down a tourist bus and cut a lap of the town. This gave us our first glances of the Colliseum and the Vatican, as well as a number of other places we plan to return to over the next couple of days. The number of things to look at is mind-blowing, and I’m still amazed at seeing almost 3000 year-old ruins sitting in a traffic island with Vespas whizzing past, oblivious.
We returned to the Trevi fountain area and decided to give the local pasta a try for dinner (still no points for originality). Wasn’t bad at all, although the prices are a bit steeper than Spain. Finally, eating honey and whisky ice creams from the renowned San Crispino gelatario on Via di Panetteria while the Trevi fountain lights came on felt like the perfect way to end the day, so we headed home to get some sleep before an early assault on the Sistine Chapel queues in the morning. Wish us luck, Simon
