Travel Tuesday

 
We leave Venice and travel down to Roma, the capital of Italy. On the way there we stop at a few petrol stations and have some more incredible Panini's...of course!

We spent two nights in Rome, our first double night stop over on the Contiki trip. This gave us a chance to do some quick washing which was great. We decided to just wash some clothes in our hotel room instead of schlepping a huge suitcase a kilometer or so down the road to a laundromat. Luckily (not really) for us our room thermostat was broken and when couldn't get it to go cooler than 25 ºC..what..go cooler?? Yes, it was winter, but Rome was still pretty warm/bearable. Being the lowest point we visited in Europe it was also nice and warm. We fought with the temperature in our room until we realised we could open the windows and get some fresh air - and leave them closed to dry our clothes while we were out.

Rome was huge. We started our first night with a bus tour - where we stopped and looked through Michaelangelos keyhole - and then dinner, followed by a walking tour to the Trevi Fountain (oh my soul it's amazing!!!) and the Pantheon. My sister and I had our first huge oh-my-soul-I'm-freaking-out-we're-in-Europe moment when we got to the Trevi Fountain. You are supposed to throw a coin into the fountain to ensure your return to Rome, my sister and I had our few coins ready to throw in and then when we got there and threw them in we just went completely delirious and threw every single coin in our wallets in, Euros Rands, Pounds...they all went in!

The Pantheon was super impressive as well. It was closed (as it was night time) and the next day we forgot to go back, so we didn't go inside, but we got to see the outside and walk in between the columns. I kept thinking about how insanely old all these buildings were. The Pantheon is almost 2000 years old, it was built in 126 AD so the wear on the stones is literally from thousands of years of people touching and brushing past them. It is incredible to try and imagine the times that this building has been through as well as the amazing feat it was to build at the time that they built it.

After the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon we went to a piazza where we got Gelato - it's AMAZING (yes...more food in Italy that's amazing!). We also spotted a 25kg tub of Nutella! From there we went to a little club and partied the night away. It was a pretty eventful party night too...one of the guys in our group fell down the stairs in the club and broke his nose and cut open the back of his head. He had to be rushed to hospital but was fine in the end...although he didn't have a massive party like that again!

The next morning we set off early to get to the Vatican for our guided tour. This tour was really long and full of information and would take me years to explain everything we saw so I'm just going to show you my favourite things.

Above is an emblem of one of the Popes, what I loved about it is that all the blue tiles are Lapis Lazuri stone, which is one of my favourite colours.

In one hall they had aerial view maps, which were drawn back in the ancient times before planes were invented but somehow they still managed to imagine how the buildings and cities would have looked from the air. The map of Venice is apparently still very accurate - seeing as though the buildings in Venice have mostly stayed the same over the last couple of hundred years.

After we went through the Vatican Museums we went into St Peter's Basilica. Which I explained briefly here. It was so amazingly beautiful and huge that it was just so overwhelming. You can never really understand the scale of this church until you are standing inside it looking up at the 130m high ceiling.

After The Vatican we made our way to the Colosseum, where we found the rest of our little group that hadn't made the early morning wake-up call. From there we split up, my sister and I choosing to go see more things in the city while the others went back to the hotel.

We went to the Capuchin Crypt, you weren't allowed to take any photos so I can't show you, but it was so weird. They decorate these tiny tombs with hundreds of bones from the monks who served and died in this church. When you get to the last tomb there is a plaque that reads "What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you will be".

We spent the rest of the day shopping and sat by the Trevi fountain again and just took it all in for a while. The plan was to meet up with our little South African group for dinner but my sister and I had two hours to wait until the time we had agreed to meet, so we decided to go back to the hotel and then just come out into the city again with everyone else for supper. What we didn't bet on, was the fact that it was rush hour when we decided to go back to the hotel. It took us 2 hours and a VERY full train ride before we got back to the hotel. By then the others had already left for dinner so we just stayed in the hotel and caught up on some sleep.

At the time, and even for a while after the trip, I never really felt like Rome was one of my favourite places, but looking back now, it was actually quiet amazing. There is so much to see and do in Rome and so much history all around you. I could easily go back there and spend some more time there.