Roma Redo

4+ years ago I made my first journey to Italia with the Abad clan on a fabulous Mediterranean cruise. Everything about the trip was awesome, everything but Rome that is. We were in Rome in late June (high tourist season) and jammed it all into one very stress-filled day. So when Vanessa mentioned that she really wanted to go to Rome I was torn. I really wanted to go on another trip with my friend who I hadn't seen in awhile, but I really had not desire to go back to Rome. I succumbed to peer pressure and am SO GLAD that I had the chance to go back. I had a wonderful experience in Rome last weekend!

I met Vanessa in Perugia and stayed with her Friday night. We got up first thing Saturday morning and took a train to Rome. (First amazing thing- it was about 75 degrees all weekend! What a nice change from the 50 degrees and raining weather we've been having in Florence for about a month now.) We were lucky enough that our hostel was right near the train station so we were able to ditch our bags at our hostel before taking the metro across the river to the Vatican for our 12 o'clock entry appointment. Instead of the two hour long line that we waited in four years ago, we were able to walk right into the Vatican museum. Don't get me wrong, there was definitely a lot of people there, but nothing like the craziness that we experienced. And while we did not have the most educational tour of the museum, we had a lot of laughs entertaining ourselves joking about all the statues. For example, an ancient tickle session?

We also had laughs that the Sistine Chapel doesn't actually exist because we had to walk through the whole museum to get there and all the signs that said "Sistine Chapel This Way" had a picture of a cappuccino underneath it. A last we finally did make it to the Sistine Chapel (it does exist, but no, there wasn't any cappuccino reward for us). This was also a much better experience than last time. There were still the guards yelling "no foto", but I was able to tune them out and spend a lot of time straining my neck to look at the beautiful ceiling. Once we managed our escape of the Vatican museum we spent some time wandering around Vatican city looking at all the fun pope-themed souvenirs. We were going to go inside St. Peter's Basilica but the line was extremely long. Instead we took in the bright sun and comfortable temperature.
Vatican city and St. Peter's Basilica

We then literally spent the next 6 hours just walking seeing everything! My feet killed by the end of the day. I was able to see two new things that I hadn't gotten to see my first time in Rome- the Pantheon & the Trevi Fountain. The Pantheon is a marvel in and of itself. Not only is it free to get into (yay!) but the building itself is really cool to see. The Trevi Fountain was also beautiful! You wander through all these small windy streets and then enter a large square with the huge fountain. We obliged with local tradition and each threw a coin over our shoulder to ensure a return visit to Rome.
We went to a place close to the train station for dinner where we split a carafe of wine and some bruschetta, and I had lasagna for dinner. We spent the evening wandering around some of the main squares and enjoying all the people watching. We spent a while scouring for a pastry for dessert and passed out soon after at our hostel.

Sunday we got up and headed to a flea market that was recommended to us by our hostel. It reminded me a lot of the flea market at Giants Stadium, but it was fun just be in that crazy environment. From there we walked to the Colosseum and also saw the Arch of Constantine. We had to wait in awhile to get our tickets to get inside the Colosseum, but the wait wasn't actually that bad. The weather was gorgeous and we wandered around the interior of the Colosseum for a very long time.

On our way to the train station we stumbled upon a quaint little place where we tried fried zucchini flowers and I had a local specialty- penne arrabiata (penne with a chili sauce). Vanessa and I split ways there and I headed back to Florence on one of the high speed trains using up the rest of my Eurorail pass.