Ciao Roma!

Ah Roma. What a breath of fresh air after Napoli. We got into the city pretty easily, and no sooner did we check into our hotel than I got us into our first car accident. It wasn’t really my fault, a silly vespa rear-ended our little Peugot while I was driving (of course), and it since it was just a little tap we went our own ways without involving the police.

We did a lot of sightseeing in those first few days, some of it by accident. While searching for a place to eat we ended up at the Pantheon, and later stumbled upon the Trevi Fountain. Both were overrun with tourists, but so cool to see.

Our second day there we made our way to the Colisseum, and then walked through the Palatines and the Roman Forum. It’s pretty amazing to see where Julius Caesar’s tomb is (and also where he was stabbed - it’s now a cat sanctuary in the middle of the city), where slaves and gladiators waited underneath the Coliseum to battle, and who knows how much more history we just wandered right past.

That second night we met up with Jon Piccirillo (pronounced pea-chee-REE-lo), who grew up across the street from Bill’s family and is great friends with his younger brother Joe. He took us to a hole in the wall Italian place that served some of the best food we’d had yet.

The next day we headed for Vatican City, with the Cathedral of San Pietro and the museum that includes the Sistine Chapel. San Pietro is enormous, and houses the Pieta, one of my favorite sculptures by Michaelangelo. We trekked up several hundred stairs to get to the top of San Pietro’s dome, where you can look down on the Basilica, or go outside and see 180 degrees of Rome. It’s a great view that let’s you look down on the Vatican Garden, which there’s no way to see otherwise.

The Vatican Museum gets a little redundant, there’s a lot of similar artwork from the same artists in the same period, so we made it pretty quickly to the Sistine Chapel, where we stood and stared for quite a while. Very impressive that Michaelangelo.

That night we met up with Jon again and he took us to some American bars where we met several of his very nice friends. We ended up at a bar where you must be American to enter, they even check to make sure that noone has an accent as they enter. In New York we would’ve taken one look at this place and ran the other direction, but it was a novelty on the other side of the world. The music was pretty much all Journey and Bon Jovi, and all the characters you try to avoid on a daily basis came together at this bar. As you can tell by this random photo, we managed to have a pretty good time anyway.

Jon offered to let us stay with him in southern Rome for a few more days and Bill and I gladly took him up on his offer. While we were there Bill helped to fix a few things around the apartment, got the toilet running, replaced lightbulbs, and hung an old painting. Jon was nice enough to cook for us several of the nights that we stayed, and took us to an area that no common tourist had seen before. We went to an awesome Italian street market and a quiet park with fantastic gelato. We were supposed to stay 2 nights but ended up hanging around for 4. It’s so nice to see a city from an insider’s point of view, we were really glad we got to stay a bit longer.