Rome:
We are in our final destination: Rome. The hotel is nice and our rooms next to each other with common balcony.
Day 1:
What can I say about Rome? The city is like a beehive, traffic is everywhere, crowds are everywhere, mopeds and motorcycles are everywhere, one has to be extremely careful crossing the street. On the other hand it's Rome with Colosseum, Vatican, museums, statues, etc.
According to our plan, the first day was going to be a tour of the city with the tour guide. She met us in our hotel, showed us how to buy and use bus tickets and we were off to Colosseum. From what little I and my wife remember from our previous visit to Rome about 34 years ago, the entry to the Colosseum was free, there were no elevators and columns were all over the place. Now, it's a different story: there is a fee to enter, elevators to get up to the top and it's clean and nothing extra in the middle. Interesting fact that I did not know: according to the tour guide, the gladiators did not fight to the death or even to the blood. They carried animal blood in pouches and punctured them during the "fight" to show blood. However, after 10 fights the gladiators who were slaves became free. So, if the fights are staged, then how difficult to fight 10 fights? I am not sure about this. You decide :)
From Colosseum we walked thru excavations of Roman Forum and then arrived at Pantheon. Late lunch happened in a small cafe near the Pantheon and ended up being a big political discussion between my cousin and our tour guide. Surprisingly enough, there was very little blame on US. Most of the discussion was about Putin and Ukraine. I think I said 2 words and I don't think our wifes said a single word.
Day 2: Next day was the Vatican. See my previous post.
Day 3: The plan for day 3 was to walk around the city. Rome is a big city, so we took a bus to the Colosseum. We started by going to Jewish ghetto area. Of course the largest synagogue I've ever seen was right in the middle. Unfortunately, we could not go in because of the Simha Tohra and security did not allow non-members in.
According to Google maps (I think I've mentioned that Google rules in previous posts) there was a knitting store near. We found the place, but there was a sign indicating that they've moved to a different location (thank you Google Translate). Unfortunately, even with Google translate we could not figure out what the new address was. Looking at the map, we realized that Trevi Fountain was about 20 minutes away. On the way we had lunch (with bottle of wine, of course) Unfortunately, when we got to the fountain we found out that it was not working (no water because clean up was in progress), but open for public. Consulting our trusted Google maps, we found our next destination: Spanish Steps. So that became our next destination, specially since it was on the way to the hotel.
At the end, we finally got to the hotel. We did a lot of walking that day. Since it was getting late, we stopped at local deli for some Italian cold cuts, olives, and of course some wine. instead of going to a restaurant. We had a nice light meal on the balcony. Nice!!!
Day 4: On our last day in Rome, we've decided to take a on-and-off tour bus. It's basically a bunch of busses going on same route around the city. For one ticket person can go on and off the bus on any stop. The ticket is good either for 1 day or 24 hours. Obviously this bus is for tourists and goes around all the tourist places. So we did the bus ride. We rode full circle without getting off just to figure out were would be a good place to get off. On the second circle we've got off few times
We had nice lunch with wine. Little more walking around. And our Italian trip was over.
Pictures have been posted.
