Chapter 1 - Rambling Around Rome: 24 Hours in the Eternal City

The Colosseum

Let me get this out of the way: I was not excited to go to Rome. I’m more of a country mouse than a city mouse, I find museums tedious (on the whole), and I hate crowds. Plus, my kid sister, who has a lot of common sense, hated Rome when she visited there as a teenager as part of a group trip with a youth orchestra, and that was enough to convince me that the place is rife with scammers and pickpockets, which is, as it turns out, true. Nevertheless, there was no way I could take Becky to Italy for the second time and not take her to Rome and this, being our 25th anniversary and all, I knew the game was up. So, to Rome we went.

Travel in a foreign country can be viewed as solving a series of logistical challenges made infinitely more difficult by not understanding the language, and that was another thing that intimidated me about Rome--the logistics. How would we navigate the infamous Rome Fuimicino (Leonardo DaVinci) Airport, find the rental car counter, secure a car, drive it somewhere safe and sensible to park, find a train to the meeting spot for our first tour, make it from there to the hotel, etc., etc.? It was all pretty intimidating. One thing I knew for sure, however: we would *not* drive into Rome. Everything I read about driving into Rome said, in effect, “only the most pathetically ignorant nitwit would DARE drive a car into Rome … ever!” and that was enough to persuade me. So, instead, we picked up the rental car and drove it around Rome to La Giustiniana, a train stop some distance from the city center that looked like it would have available parking guaranteed. It did have available parking and lots of it. Only one problem: how to pay. We had no idea. The ticket machine at the entry seemed broken. Google translate failed us. The one working machine rejected our card without explanation. We were at a loss until a rude Italian--you know the ones you always hear about?--walked up and helped us try to use the machine with our card, and, when that failed, bought us a parking ticket, showed us how to place it in our car window, and then walked away. Later the same ‘rude’ Italian would refuse repayment for the parking fare and give us an extra train ticket so we didn’t have to burn two to get into the city(!) In short, she was super sweet and super helpful to two complete strangers who couldn’t speak a word of Italian beyond “grazie” which, apparently, is one word more than she understood of English. Fortunately, we humans are adept at communicating non-verbally, which should encourage even the most timid of international travelers. As it turns out, there are a lot of good people out there who will go out of their way to help a perfect stranger.

Given that we were jetlagged foreigners starting a day in Italy when it was bedtime in the USA, the rest of our plans for the day may seem just a wee bit ambitious, as we scheduled not one but two back-to-back tours that day. We caught the train after validating our tickets (thank you again, good samaritan stranger), arriving in the historic downtown early enough to decide to drop our day packs, including a change of clothing, at the hotel so we didn’t have to lug them around the Vatican. We transferred to the Metro successfully and (fortunately) caught it in the right direction, getting off at Flaminio, where we planned to walk to our hotel, passing many of the more popular landmarks in Rome, starting with the Piazza del Popolo, then the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, and Piazza Navona.

Trevi Fountain

Walking around the historic center of Rome proved quite interesting: quiet alleys and squares off the main tourist routes, interesting shops, churches, and museums. Public fountains. Repurposed old stuff everywhere: a sarcophagus turned into a fountain, ancient stone jars used as flower pots, decorations from an ancient building set into a modern wall.

Typical street in the historic section 

Window of the Palazzo Zucchari 

Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza Navona

Fortunately, the city was lively and lovely so we weren’t bothered much by the jetlag. We wound our way to the meeting place for our tour, and, after locating it with plenty of time to spare, went further on in search of what was supposed to be a good value restaurant on the north side of the Vatican called Trattoria Massa. Google Maps led us there, but when we arrived, Trattoria Massa was nowhere to be found. Instead, at that address, we found a bustling lunch place called Ristorante dei Musei, which did not have great reviews on TripAdvisor. To add to the confusion, the green awning above the restaurant read “Ristorante Bar dei Musei Pizza Massa,” which sounds kind of like the right place combined with the wrong place, right? I’m confused to this day, as there remain many distinct reviews for both restaurants on TripAdvisor. In any event, we felt fortunate to get a table at the restaurant whatever-its-name even though our table was was in full sun because it looked to be the last available without a wait. We ordered a pizza and some pasta (when in Rome) and it was … expectation building, drumroll please … lame. Far and away the most disappointing food of our trip to Europe. We could’ve found significantly better food at any random convenience store on the Autostrada. The pizza was awful. Beyond bad. Like “I’d rather eat Little Caesar’s” kinda bad. It tasted like--and I’m not exaggerating--a frozen pizza with a few canned mushrooms dropped onto it. The pasta was okay, but super oily. Our kids make better. Fortunately, the bleakness of the lunch was relieved by a quick stop at Old Bridge Gelateria, which serves melty but delicious gelato out of a tiny shop just across from the Piazza del Risorgimento on the north side of the Vatican. The bacci and stracciatella were particularly good.

At that piazza we checked in with Walks of Italy (https://www.walksofitaly.com/rome-tours; highly recommended) for our tour of the Vatican Museums and St. Peter’s Basilica, which was led by the indominatible and energetic Siriana (she goes by, conveniently, the nickname “Siri”) who led us through the thick crowds in the museums and gave us a crash course in art history. Siri had a remarkable knack for navigating lines and an even more remarkable knowledge and love of love of art and art history.

One of the many (crowded) hallways, Vatican Museum

While we found the tour highly informative and the artwork spectacular--particularly the myriad sculptures and the splendor of the buildings themselves--I’m not sure I’d recommend it as a first activity on short sleep as it’s a *lot* to take in. Kind of a ‘drinking from the firehose’ type experience, particularly with the masses of tourists and organized tours crowding every available space. Bit of a madhouse, even if one pays for one of the tours that allow you to “skip the lines,” which basically means skipping some, but not all, of the entrance lines. My advice: consider an evening tour when the museums are less crowded.

The Sistine Chapel and the stories behind the paintings there are extraordinary, but it’s hard to feel the awe of that space when it’s crammed with 500 or so tourists and a fellow keeps bellowing “SILENCIO!” over the loudspeaker every few minutes in a failed attempt to ensure some modicum of reverence. In St. Peter’s Basilica, Michelangelo’s Pieta is exquisite, but one has to view it through bulletproof glass thanks to Lazlo Toth, a crazed Australian, who, fashioning himself Jesus reincarnated, attacked the sculpture with a hammer in 1973, doing significant damage to the figure of Mary. The rest of St. Peter’s Basilica is, well, huge. Yuuuge even. Despite all the grandeur, I tend to side with Siri, who told us she prefers the smaller and less ornate medieval cathedrals of Rome. That’ll have to wait for a future trip, though we did stumble across one in a courtyard not far from the Trevi Fountain. On a whim, we ducked in and found a compact but beautiful cathedral lit with candles, its ceiling covered with frescoes. As we were about to leave, a procession of novice priests walked in, singing a capella and bearing some sort of icon. Their clear voices echoing in that space moved me more than all the grandeur of St. Peter’s. 

One small part of St. Peter's Basilica

Posing with Lucca in front of the Vittoriano
or the "Wedding Cake" as locals call it derisively 

After returning to our hotel, we had a few minutes to freshen up before heading to our next tour, a night bicycle ride with Rex Tours (https://rex-tours.com/en/) which we found about a 10 minute walk south of our hotel. The owner there, the son of a German father and an Italian mother, could switch readily from nearly flawless English to German and Italian and then back again. Our tour guide, Lucca, wasn’t as fluent, but his English was good and he was charming, with a fun personality and a fashion-model good looks.

On the walk back to our hotel, we stumbled across an extraordinarily good tiramisu shop called (oddly) Two Sizes (Via del governo vecchio 88, https://www.facebook.com/twosizes/) where we bought a couple of tiramisu cups that we ate later--a classic version and a pistachio version, that was (trust me) a revelation; and then found a table at a bustling wine bar called Cybo (Via di Tor Millina 27; https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187791-d1501113-Reviews-Cybo-Rome_Lazio.html), just a few steps from our hotel. Open until 1:00 a.m., they barely had a seat available at 11:00 p.m. The food lived up to the stellar reviews and delivered the best meal we had in Rome. Standouts: pumpkin ravioli and an Irish fillet of beef served with perfectly roasted potatoes. I don’t know how we were still on our feet at that point, but we found the energy at 12:30 a.m. to walk back to another place we’d passed earlier, Gelateria Frigidarium (Via del Governo Vecchio 112; http://www.frigidarium-gelateria.com/gelateria.htm) for some standout artisanal gelato. (His: cinammon + bacci; hers: tiramisu + chocolate = yummy!)

One note on staying near Navona Plaza: be forewarned, it’s loud and the restaurants are open late. The room was warm enough that we left the window open, which brought in the deliciously cool night air, but also the sounds of late-night revelers, who didn’t pipe down until around 3:00 a.m. It was only the next morning that we realized that our hotel apartment had an air conditioner …

The next morning we woke early, grabbed a quick breakfast (a juice and croissant at a local shop represented the ‘breakfast included’ part of our stay at the Tower Navona Relais), and made our way on foot to the Colosseum for the start of our next and final Rome tour. The skies looked threatening and, as we arrived at the Colosseum, they burst. We soon found ourselves waiting for our tour group to assemble sheltering from the downpour under some cedar trees in a ratty park--the Parco del Colle Oppio--on a hill overlooking the Colosseum from the northwest. Fortunately, by the time we made it through the security lines at the entrance to the Colosseum, the storm had let up, leaving rounded mammatus clouds darkening the skies above the ruins.

Storm clouds over the Colosseum with the Arch of Constantine in the foreground

Note the pockmarks in the archways

The Colosseum represents one of the most remarkable architectural feats of the ancient world. Built out of enormous blocks of travertine and tufa (forms of limestone), it would’ve been clad in its heyday with marble and adorned with countless statues and a large, removable roof made of stretched canvas. The limestone blocks were held together with iron rods that allowed the building to flex in response to earthquakes. While portions of the exterior wall have fallen down over the centuries, that failure wasn’t in the design but rather in the Roman penchant for salvaging stuff from old ruins to build something new. For that reason, the Colosseum was gradually stripped of its statues, its marble, and the iron rods that helped hold it together, giving the building that still stands today (without most of its iron supports) a pock-marked look. Quite extraordinary that the Romans had the knowhow to build something of that size and complexity, which included a series of heavy duty elevators that could lift men, animals, and equipment from the basements up to floor of the Colosseum.

Exterior walls at night

Every citizen was issued a free, lifetime ticket to the stadium--unique numbers stamped into a clay tablet--which corresponded to a specific entrance, section, row, and seat number, much the same as in modern stadiums. The arena could seat as many as 87,000--an impressive figure even by today’s standards--and included a plumbing system with running water. The lifetime ticket corresponded to a day of the week, so one had the right to a particular seat on a particular day, but not every day. 

View of the Roman Forum from Palatine Hill

Architectural lasagna

After spending a bit too long at the Colosseum, we walked past the Arch of Constantine, which spans the ancient Via Trumphalis, the road taken by emperors entering Rome when they returned from a battle triumphant, to Palantine Hill. We loved both Palantine Hill and the Roman Forum. The former offers sweeping views of the city in all directions, fountains, and formal gardens, while both offer expansive grassy fields punctuated by walls and ruins of one sort or another. With more time, taking a picnic to the top of the Palantine would be a great way to spend a few hours. The parks and gardens there are quiet and lovely and the views breathtaking. They call Rome “architectural lasagna” because it’s made up of buildings built on ruins, built on older ruins, built on still older ruins, but we saw a different type of ‘layering’ from the top of the Palantine: centuries of history--from ancient to modern--captured in nearly every sweeping view.

The Roman Forum struck us as an interesting place to wander with a guidebook: here a random stone pillar, there the remains of a wall with Latin letters still legible, crumbling stone and ruins everywhere and amongst it nooks and crannies like the spot where the body of Julius Caesar was cremated shortly after his assassination. Even the gravel there looked interesting, with some of it clearly old marble from the crumbling ruins. Our guide showed us an artist’s rendering of what it would’ve looked like back in the day, and, like the Colosseum, it attests to the brilliant engineering, architecture, and grandeur of ancient Rome.

View from the bottom of the Roman Forum, near where Julius Caeser was cremated

Leaving the Roman Forum, we walked a few blocks in search of a place to grab a quick bite. On TripAdvisor, we found the highly regarded Fuorinorma just a short walk away but, like our first restaurant stop, it proved a disappointment. They serve local cheese and meat samplers there, and we would’ve done well to follow the lead of our fellow patrons and go with one of those. Flustered by the extensive menu and quick-moving line, however, we opted for a couple of paninis that sounded good, but proved dry and uninspired. I don’t care what restaurant you are: don’t pair one of those listless, whitish pink things that grocery stores label as ‘tomatoes’ with mozzarella and basil and call it “caprese.” Smart restaurants in Europe and the U.S. serve only one kind of tomato when the regular ones are out of season: cherry or cocktail tomatoes, which are the only tomatoes that ship well and hold decent flavor year round. To make matters worse, the server forgot about the paninis and so they sat on the counter for several minutes before they saw us still sitting there and realized they hadn’t given us our food. All in all: meh. We would’ve done (and did do) better on the Autostrada.

From there we caught the Metro, transferred to a northbound train, and, with great relief, found our car still parked placidly (with our luggage, sans tickets or shattered windows) at the La Giustiniana train station.

And so ended our whirlwind tour of Rome. Better with more time? Certainly. But we felt that we got a pretty good taste of it, all things considered.