Roma

Roma - the centre of Italian history, home to some of the most amazing structures we have ever seen and the first of our 3 night stays.

For our first full day there we made an early dash into the city so we could beat the crowds and the queues for The Colosseum. We were first in line and managed to get some great shots before the hordes took over.

From there we had a local guide show us around the city and saw some ruins and the monument of the unknown soldier and left the guide at the Pantheon. Our group then went off to explore the city and tracked down most of the other “must sees” – The fountain of youth (I bathed my face and filled our bottles to make our insides young too), tossed our 3 coins into The Trevi Fountain for luck and so we could return to Rome and enjoyed a gelati on the Spanish Steps.

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Oops, forgot to mention a rather important thing we did here too - visiting The Vatican. We spent a couple of hours here, walking through the endless halls filled with artworks, sculptures and tapestries but after seeing a couple of palaces already, I was a bit like Shania Twain - they didn't impress me much. A couple of breaks later and we finally got to the Sistine Chapel which again, was rather underwhelming. The famous ceiling that was painted by Michaelango is in fact a mosaic of dozens of small pictures, rather than the one big one I expected.

We walked through St Paul's Cathedral, looked at a bunch of Pope's corpses (they display their embalmed bodies in glass cabinets - how vulgar), we walked down through the big square where the Pope gives his speeches and had our own display.

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During the afternoon the weather turned and we had the first afternoon of showers that would continue for the next few days. As planned, we wanted to have another picnic for dinner so after stopping at a deli for the essential wine, bread, cheese and antipasti, we found a lovely park in the city with big trees to shield us and lots of green grass everywhere. After setting up our picnic, we took a look around and realised that it wasn’t quite as nice as we thought it was. While the park in Annecy was peaceful and quiet and had a lovely canal running nearby, this time we had settled down to eat in a dog park and spent the next 20 mins fending off our dinner from marauding canines with a taste for smoked meats. Funny.

After dinner we ventured off to find the Mouth of Truth. We wandered. In circles. For an hour and a half. When we finally found it near the entrance to a church, the gates were closed. We sat down and finished off the wine from dinner then went to see the Colosseum by night before heading home to the hotel for sleep.

The next day we took a day trip to Pompeii, three hours south of Rome. Pompeii is the city that was buried by ash and volcanic rock when Mt Vesuvius erupted in 79AD. The city was (re)discovered in 1748 and has been slowly excavated the city since then and are still only 2/3’s completed. We had a tour of the site and saw the famous mummified remains of several Pompeiians, shielding their mouths from the ash and smoke and even saw the curled up remains of a dog. While there, we also walked through an ancient brothel, complete with stone beds and pictures above each doorway advertising what you could get inside the room, just like a menu. Those Pompeiians were a horny and creative bunch!!

We left Roma early the next morning, and began our journey to Venezia, stopping at a gorgeous hilltop town, Orvietto for a couple of hours to explore. Of course no day is without song with me around and Nicky and I spent much of our time singing in our best falsetto every time someone said the name of the town or we saw a sign. Sung to the tune of the French folk song ‘Alouette’.

“Orvietto, jaunty Orvietto, Orvietto jaunty aleeoo”

We stumbled across a great studio of an Italian painter and we all fell in love with his paintings and sculptures. There were prints available of a lot of his paintings so we bought several for home. Unfortunately the sculptures and original I loved the most were either not for sale (sculptures) or 900 Euro for the painting. Sadly, there were no prints for that one either :(

We grabbed a quick bite to eat, a macchiato to wash it down with and jumped back on the bus to continue our drive to Venezia and its famous canals.