Roma – Oct 1-3

Ferry arrived in Ancona on time and while waiting for the elevator to take us down to car deck we met  a lady named Jane from Australia who took a year off from her life (as she put it) to spend living in Sicily and travelling around Europe. Together we managed to get a cab and made iI to the train station in plenty of time to buy tickets, have a caffe, and still make the 8:25 am train to Rome!  Yippee – no waiting around for the afternoon for the next train.  Arriving in Rome we found one of our B&B hosts immediately as she was there holding up my name.  Aren’t we important?  The B&B was well situated to the train station which will come in handy when we have to return to it a couple days later for our train to Venice.

Much has changed in 20 years in Rome; yet so much has stayed the same.  And despite the short amount of time we had there we managed to see a lot: Spanish Stairs, Trevi Fountain, plenty of churches including St. Peter’s, the Pantheon, Vittoria Emmanuele monument, Coliseum, more roman ruins then you can shake a stick at, Apollo Temple, St. Angelo bridge….  By the time our own personal Roma Express tour ended two days later our feet were so sore. 

On our full day the transportation sector was on strike so our original plan of taking the metro to St. Pete’s and walking back became walking there and back. 

 

By the time we arrived back in our neighbourhood all we wanted to do was sit down – and we did this in a restaurant called Vecchia Roma. An underground restaurant known for its authentic roman cuisine and a place you MUST have reservations for. Although they found us a table (we got there early – 7 pm) we watched as many other people without reservations got turned away. We decided to try the fixed menu (x2) and there was so much food we could probably have just used ½ of one portion. But the food was GOOD! Homemade bread like I remember being made fresh from my Italian family, pasta with fresh sauce not something from a jar, etc. The meal included wine, water, dessert, salad, potatoes, caffe, and liqueur as well.

Afterwards, sore and tired but pleasantly full (okay stuffed) we made our way back to our B&B to get ready for our morning train to Venice, laughing about lemoncello the whole way.