There's ALWAYS Room for Jelly! - Italy in ten days Pt 2: When in Rome...

Italy in ten days Pt 2: When in Rome...

After our impromptu picnic on the grass in front of the train station in Florence, we headed into the throng of the afternoon train station and found out which platform our train to Rome was on. We found the track and walked a way down the track to wait for the train to come in. We found the car that was on our tickets and then found our seats. It was pretty cool, I hadn't been on a train (SkyTrain in Vancouver or the Toronto Subway don't really count) since I was a little kid and my Grandma and I took a train from Calgary to Vancouver.

It was about a 2.5 hour train ride, but it went pretty quick. Watching the countryside roll by out the window you could tell as soon as you left Tuscany as the hills gave way to flat plains. We rolled in to Rome around 3:00 in the afternoon and went first to our hotel to check in. It was a long weekend in Italy so a lot of places were booked up and Tina told them we would be there by 3, or they were going to give our room away. We were staying at a place called Hotel Firenze which was just a couple blocks from the train station. It was kind of interesting, I'd never seen a hotel like it before. The building actually had a couple hotels in it, plus some residential apartments and even a couple offices. We walked up to the third floor (which was really four flights of stairs as the ground floor is 0 and the first floor is up one flight of stairs) and went into the office. Neither of us had our passports with us, but they still required photo-id to check in. I should have remembered that from books & movies like The Day of the Jackal, but I didn't. Fortunately I had my Cayman Drivers License and Tina had some other form of photo-id that they accepted. Once we checked in we went back down to the second floor and waited by the door off the stairs for them to buzz us in. Inside was a hallway with six doors leading off, two on each side and two corner rooms at the end. Our hotel room was just big enough for a bed, a desk, a chair and a tiny little bathroom with a toilet, sink & shower that was demarcated just by the curtain hanging from a bar.

We dropped off our bag and headed back out on foot. We wandered up towards the Piazza Republica and dodged a couple rain showers in a gelato shop. This particular gelato wasn't as good as Giancarlo's gelato down here in Cayman. We then walked down Via 20 Settembre to the Quirinale where we arrived just in time to see the changing of the guard. There was a small museum that was open to the public so we wandered in to look at the paintings and statuary that was on display. One of the statues they had there was Rodin's Thinker, on loan from some museum in France, and a couple paintings that were practically pornographic, but hey, it's art, it can't be porn! :) Neither Tina nor myself knew what the Quirinale was, and I forgot to look it up until today when I Googled it and it took me to an entry in Wikipedia. Turns out that it's one of the "Seven Hills of Rome" and is the official residence of the head of state of Italy.

From there we made our way down the hill to Via de San Vincenzo and to the Trevi Fountain. We stayed there a good 15-20 minutes, checking out the fountain and also looking around at all the people crowded around and watching the street hawkers try to sell their crap to people. Mark in Austin said to make sure and check it out at night, so we exited, stage left with the intention of coming back later that night when it was dark. From the Trevi Fountain, we wandered down the Via di Propaganda to the Piazza di Spagna and the Spanish Steps (Flickr photos). We were wondering why it was called the Piazza di Spagna, so we sat down on the steps, cracked open the guidebook and looked it up. Facing the plaza is the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican, which has been there for 300 years. That's quite a lease! The place was packed with people just sitting around, talking, smoking, kissing, whatever. The book also said that this is where a bunch of the old poets used to hang out: Keats, Wagner, Lord Byron and their ilk. The guidebook also said just down the street was "the most lavish McDonalds in the world" so for a laugh we went in and took a look and it IS pretty lavish! But it's still a McDonalds for cryin' out loud! There was a vendor on the corner selling roasted chestnuts. I'd never had them before, so we got a small cone of them and I had a few, but I don't think I'd go out of my way to find them again. :)

We left and continued on to the Piazza del Popolo (Flickr photos). We wandered around the square at sundown and messed around with some different settings on the cameras for different effects, just for fun and took some photos of the obelisk in the center of the square that Augustus brought back (stole?) after conquering Egypt before heading back up the Via Del Corso headed for the Pantheon. We cut through the Piazza Colona and made our way to the Pantheon on Via dei Pastini. It was closed by the time we got there (1905h) so we took some photos of the outside with varying settings just for creativity's sake and headed south down Via di Torre Argentina to the Jewish ghetto looking for a specific restaurant that someone told Tina about. We found it, it was called Ristorante da Gigetto and was famous for it's baccala and deep-fried artichokes. They were pretty full up, so we made a reservation for 10:00 and went down the road a bit to another place called Il Giardino Romano. We had deep-fried zucchini flowers which were surprisingly good (I was a bit leery), deep-fried olives, and croquettes de patate. For whatever reason, when I'm with Tina I'm a much more adventurous eater. We split a pizza, so we had a rather big first course! At 10:00 we went back to da Gigetto and got seated way in the back. That place was HUGE! I thought it had a dozen tables outside and three small tables inside, but there were multiple dining rooms inside as well as another huge terrace. If they were full up before that's a huge amount of people and food! We ordered the deep-fried artichoke and an order of baccala, but I wasn't feeling too hot, probably a mixture of travelling about 6000 miles since last time I slept, walking about four miles and eating a big plate of deep-fried everything. I had a taste of the deep-fried artichoke and a taste of the baccala, but I don't have any basis of comparison.

After dinner we walked through the old Jewish ghetto and back onto the Via Del Teatro Marcello, cut across the Piazza Venezia, crossed in front of the monument to Victor Emmanuel and back up the Via del Corso. We made our way back to the Trevi Fountain along Via Della Murante and checked it out at nighttime, as Mark suggested. Wow. As impressive as it was during the day, with the lights on at night and the contrast of the night sky and the glowing blue water against the white marble, it was pretty breathtaking. During dinner we were discussing some of the various settings on our cameras. Tina had a Canon Powershot but a different model than mine. The icons were the same though, so we were able to find the different settings on her camera that matched up with mine. What we were talking about was the "night portrait" mode. This uses the flash to fill in the foreground, but also slows down the shutter to allow more light from the background to enter the CCD. It requires a verrry steady hand or better, a tripod. The picture to the right was shot in night portrait mode, which is why the people in the foreground are visible, and blurry. We sat there for awhile soaking up the sight and taking photos with varied settings, flash and no flash and then followed almost the same route back to our hotel that we took on our way out. We made it back to our hotel around midnight, and just past the six mile mark for the night. I was unconscious and snoring before my head hit the pillow and nothing short of a world-ending asteroid collision would have woken me up. In the morning we checked out and headed for the Metro to take the subway to the Vatican City.