Rome

With bleary eyes, we greeted the morning sun across the Italian countryside.  We being Aidan and I as we were the first two out of our "couchette" sleeper compartment on the overnight train from Stuttgart.  While the kids thought it was pretty cool, I find the idea of the overnight train more romantic sounding than it turned out to be.  Maybe it's because we were in a compartment for six, with the remaining two entering the compartment several hours into our attempts at sleep; or maybe it's because the sleeping berth was not really long enough for me, even if I lay on an angle.  Regardless, we woke up to bright sun and golden countryside reminiscent of the Colorado Plateau in the late summer with little else to hint at what we would experience and enjoy once settled into Rome.

Settling took a little while.  First, the phone number we were provided to contact the guy we rented our apartment from didn't work.  Once in the apartment and schooled by Fabrizio (the apartment guy), we made our way through the neighborhood - everything we needed within three blocks, i.e. banco automat (the bank machine), a market, and a train station.  Then, we boldly walked to the train station and bus stop to figure out how to get into central Rome.  We stared at signs, tried to communicate with bus drivers, even thought of just getting on the train and pleading tourist ignorance.  In the end, we skulked back to our apartment temporarily defeated.  With a little more information, the next day went much better in that we successfully bought tickets (but used them wrong),  and finally got on a train after watching one train go by as we stared at the information board trying to figure it all out.  And we learned that schedules in Italy are a relative thing.  Despite all of this, we made it into Vatican City for an arranged tour.

Vatican City - at 140 acres, the smallest "country" in the world - packs several "biggest things" into its small area.  But even more impressive than St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museum is the amount of influence and power wielded by this center of the Catholic world.  But that was something we began to understand during our 5 days here.  Rome was the center of the world for hundreds of years; and even after it fell it continued to influence the development of Europe.  With so much to see in such a short time, where should we start especially with two boys more interested in climbing on the Roman walls than contemplating what occurred within the walls.  To provide some focus and to hopefully engage our guys, we arranged to take two walking tours through Rome, one in the evening and the other in the midday.  We got lucky because our guide completely captured our kids, especially Charlie who walked right along side Richard our guide and had a non-stop conversation with him.  Richard showed us a part of Rome we might have missed had we poked about on our own.

The evening tour started in the middle of Piazza Venezia, a large and loudly congested square, and ended walking through small ally-like streets, where the sounds of the city seemed to disappear into the ancient buildings.  After the tour, we sat in Piazza San Ignazio at a outdoor restaurant that could have been in a country village for how peaceful it was.  And after a long day, through which the kids had been super, the parents made a tactical mistake - we missed the signs that said the subway closed at 9pm.  Now that it was 11pm, with the kids running out of effort, we couldn't quite remember the name of the street our apartment was on as we hailed a cab.  After talking with the cab driver (he in Italian, we in English) and throwing out some names we could remember from around our area, he figured it out and we made it back.

That was last night.  We followed it up this morning by heading back into the city (we're out of town a little bit), a little earlier than the kids really wanted to do.  They rallied and we had a wonderful tour of the Roman Forum and the Colosseum.  We saw so much but missed so much more.  At least we have a framework now so that the next time we're in Rome we can really see something...

In the morning we leave for the Amalfi Coast.  We'll be staying in the Sorrento area with a plan to go to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  We'll drop a note after we settle into that area.  At least we have the trains figured out...

Ciao,
Paul