Roma

So after waking up and waiting for the train to arrive, we stopped at Roma Tiburtina Station. It was not what I was expecting at all for the capital city of Italy. The train station had several homeless inhabitants, and smelt a bit funky. My plan had been to walk to Roma Termini Station to meet Rachael about an hour later, but there was no signage as to what direction anything was. After looking around aimlessly the sun finally came up a bit higher, and now knowing which direction was North, I started to head in the general direction of Rachael’s train station.

Once away from the train station a bit, I got a better idea of where I was (had a map on my iPod) and managed to find my way to the station with plenty of time to meet Rachael. Once we were reunited, I next task was to find our Hostel. Neither Rachael or I had brought directions, so we were forced to go off my very vague memory that it was only 2 streets from the station, although which streets I couldn’t remember. After walking through several streets with luggage in tow, we FINALLY found our Hostel and were able to dump our gear. By the time we had carried our luggage up the two flights of stairs to reception, Rachael had almost had a heart attack and died. We used the lift from then on.

With our luggage no longer in the way, we set out to explore the city. Around each new corner we would find something interesting and old-looking to discover and after walking past a couple of ruins we made our way towards the Colosseum and the forum. After a quick look, we decided to come back another day and continued exploring the city on foot, heading towards a field that we later found out was the place where chariot races were held, were there was a festival taking place in which people were re-enacting something and in old-time Roman gear.

We stumbled into some amazing church that was basically all gold (maybe not but it blinded you with extravagance). I wish I could have filmed Rachael’s face as her jaw just dropped and stayed dropped for about 5mins. Then we got an elevator up to the top of the “Giant White Monstrosity” which was next door.

More walking around the city, we found somewhere to have lunch. 2 shitty overpriced pizzas later and we continued on our journey, this time walking to the Trevi Fountain, which was a pretty rad fountain that I had never heard of, much to Rachael’s dismay. Apparently it’s in “a million different movies” but I imagine they are mostly all chick-flicks. The area itself was packed with other tourists, and so we left as soon as possible.

We found near the train station an area where artists were selling paintings, most of which were incredible and we got to see some art for free that was better than most of the stuff we saw in museums.

We then went back to our semi-dodgy hostel for some sleep. The room itself was nice, just the fact that the the shower and toilet was in the same cubicle and there idea of “breakfast included” means providing bread and jam every day was dodgy.

DAY 2 in Rome, we went on a “Hop-on Hop-off Tour” which is a open top bus that drives you around the city. We also took a boat up the river as part of the deal, but it was a pretty boring river really. After getting a glimpse of the front of the Vatican, which still had posters and stuff up from the canonization the day before, we headed back on the bus to visit the Colosseum.

At the Colosseum, some lady offered us a skip-the-line tour which we paid for and went on. Our guide was really good and told us all kinds of facts about the games, and related it back to modern times. The actual Colosseum itself is much smaller than I expected, but was still a pretty cool building and must have been incredible back when it was built.

As part of our tour we also got to see the forum, this time with a different guide, who was also good. We learnt that after the Roman Empire fell, the city dropped back to a tiny population and most of the ancient city was used as a dump and buried. When Napoleon came along a few hundred years ago, he saw the top of an arc of triumph that had a door cut into it and a guy doing haircuts inside. He thought that it was disgusting that the former greatest city in the world had been turned into a dump, and after that they started digging up the city, and what we saw was only 2% of the original city. Most of it is still underground but because they have built on top of it they aren’t allowed to boot people out of their homes on the off chance there is some epic statue underneath it. There was also a church with a floating door that you couldn’t enter, because they built the church on top of an older building and when they dug everything back to the original height and uncovered the building below the door of the church is way higher.

At the end the guide told us about a night tour that he was doing, but when we went to the meeting point later he never showed up. So then we just went home. On the way we had another go and trying to get some authentic Italian cuisine and found a nicer looking restaurant where we got some Angry Spaghetti and Quattro Fromage Pizza. Unlike the day before, these tasted pretty amazing.

We also got the bus past some sort of movie premier for an Italian movie that we had seen lots of posters for, but we didn’t know any of the actors so we didn’t really care.

DAY 3 saw us leaving Italy for the morning and entering the Vatican City, which I didn’t realise is actually a country to itself. The Vatican museum was simply incredible, and the reason is that everything cool in Rome was stolen by the church and is in that museum. St Peter’s Basilica is basically ancient Rome because they stole all the expensive marble and gold etc. from the Colosseum and pantheon and what not to build it, which is why the city is now ruins and the forum was turned into a dump. There was rooms and rooms of statues and tapestries and everything you could think of, and every room had incredible artworks on the walls and ceilings, with intricate tile mosaics on the floor.

A special type of purple marble was used for a tonne of Statues, and our guide told us that the Vatican owns something like 90% of of this marble in existence. By far my favourite part of the museum was the Raphael Rooms and in particular, this painting.

By DAY 4 we were ready to leave Rome behind, and so after checking out of the Hostel we basically just waited at the train station for 2 hours for our train to Florence…