yadda yadda yadda

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert

I’ve got as far as having a full set of green lights and what seems to be a strong wi-fi signal everywhere in the apartment but the devices – iMac, iPad, iPhone – just keep dropping the connection and then not being able to reconnect. I’m pretty sure it’s a Mac address issue (whatever that is!) but have no idea how to fix it.

Obviously I’ll call them tomorrow but who knows when that might spring a result.

To leave a reply to this you need to click the link on the right under “Asides”.

Thanks for any help.

Let’s start with a map to get our bearings:

The areas you will want to spend most of your time in are all of the coloured parts except for; Via Veneto, Villa Borghese, Janiculum, Aventino, Caracalla, Esquilino & Quirinal. Your routes may well wander through these areas but they will not in themselves be a destination – not if you follow my tips at any rate!

Take as much time in Rome as you possibly can, within reason. Depends really on the depth you wish to go into but for anything more than drive-by tourism you need a minimum of four days preferably a week or two. I recommend five or six full days in Rome to see all the main things plus a little shopping/relax time.

TIPS – GENERAL

1. Unless you’re really tight for cash get a taxi or hotel transfer from the airport. Fiumicino is not far out of the city so the cost is not greatly different from the bus or train transfers and would be much easier and quicker. We paid in advance for a bus which drops you at Termini (main rail station) and you get a cab from there. I wouldn’t bother next time.
2. If you have a spare day go visit Ostia, the ancient Roman port and route from the Med up the Tiber. It is more or less the same area as the airport. We didn’t do this but after seeing how much stuff had to be transported to Rome centre from all parts of their Empire it feels like something we should have done and by all accounts it is worth visiting.
3. Location, location, location is the key when it comes to choosing a hotel. Unless you have bionic legs you need to be in the right place. Even what seem like short distance days turn into longer ones and then when you do that day after day carrying a backpack/shopping bags it really does wear you down. My triangle of love when it comes to hotel location is if you draw lines between the A of Navona, the F of Fountain and the V of Venice. That’s the bottom of the purple ‘Pantheon’ area and is where we stayed. Honestly, when your base is here it seems that wherever you may have wandered to your hotel is a short (5-15 minute) walk away. We did everything on foot with the exception of a taxi to and from the Vatican Museum which is at the far end of the yellow Vatican area. Even that is easily managed to be fair but it was our fourth day and we needed to save legs.
4. Go at an unpopular time of year – January, November, whatever. When it is hot and brimming with tourists squeezing through the narrow streets it must be hell. Even at these unpopular times, make sure you hit the big ones – Vatican Museum for example, on a weekday. We did the Vatican on Thursday and it was easy. We had a booking so didn’t need to buy tickets but even if we had there was no queue when we turned up – about 09:00. As we left Rome, Sunday morning around 11:00, the queue was horrendous. Must have been 1km long at least. Rome is a popular weekend trip so you should bear in mind the increased activity between Friday pm and Monday am. Seriously, there were more law enforcement officers in Rome than tourists most of the time we were there but it got noticeably busier at the weekend!
5. Don’t bother with the roast chestnuts they were pants. Do bother with the ice cream, it’s very good! I forget the name of my favourite, it was a small modern chain. It’ll come back to me and I’ll edit later.
6. Never and I mean never eat or drink near a tourist attraction. Take a side street and find a place that a) looks like it’s in serious need of a remodel, b) has nobody outside waving menus at you and c) is full of Italians. You’ll get better food at half the price. This is a generalisation of course but one worth following. Prices and quality vary greatly. We avoided expensive fancy restaurants and the lowest bill for the three of us was 45 EUR for a good meal the highest was double that at just over 90 EUR but there’s little relationship between price and quality. Same with coffees and other drinks. You can pay 5 EUR or more for each item or you can pay 5 EUR for the lot, just depends where you choose to sit.
7. Food – Develop a liking for the three P’s – pizza, pasta and panini – as they are hard to avoid. Artichoke similarly seems to end up at every meal. If you’re feeling brave, build yourself up for a helping of traditional Roman tripe. Watch out for the antipasti surprise. This is normally a collection of cold meats with or without extras like olives, pickles whatever however more than once in Rome the antipasti was a collection of their hot ‘tempura style’ dishes. Things like artichoke (natch!) and other stuff dipped in a light batter and then fried. Seems to be the ‘fish and chips’ of Rome. The rest was pretty much want you’d expect from Italy. We had better food this time than last but I’m still not impressed by Roman food. There were no wow! moments and nothing that will remain long in the memory from a food or drink perspective. Hard to find any other ethnic food either – Indian, Chinese/Cantonese, Thai and so on. We asked the very knowledgeable guys on reception and they had no clue where to find anything that wasn’t Italian or International.
8. Work out your coffee strategy. We like milky coffee but actually with some coffee in it. The Roman ‘latte’ is milk that once had a distant association with half a coffee bean. Utterly useless unless you like warm milk. On the other hand the macchiato is an espresso that once knew a tiny, pocket-sized cow. The only thing roughly between the two is the cappuccino, of course, but it is easy to look a fool when ordering this type of coffee in Italy where it is primarily for breakfast and it’s too frothy anyway. We didn’t really work this one out properly. An Americano con latte worked sometimes but the coffee is too watery and you have to tell them whether you want the milk hot or cold and the word for hot sounds a lot like cold (caldo) and so on. Best of luck.
9. Best shopping is definitely the areas to the right of the Pantheon on the map – Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, Piazza del Popolo as well as the top end of the Pantheon area. If you want Gucci Falluci then the street from Via del Corso to the Spanish Steps is the place, Via dei Condotti. Via del Corso itself, usually named as THE shopping street is a big-time bore. There are the odd pockets elsewhere and some spectacular food stores but most of the rest is just souvenir trash. Didn’t find any shopping centres, thank God!

TIPS – WHAT TO DO

Assuming you’ve taken my advice and are based somewhere in the middle then you can split exploring the city into 4 segments radiating around the central hub:

• Four areas on the map; Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Piazza del Popolo, Pantheon. The highlights are obvious and none of them need take up more than 30 minutes each as there is nothing much to do beyond looking, reading, photographing and popping in, up or around. While in the area you can scout for shops to return to on ‘shopping day’.
• One area on the map; Vatican & Castel St Angelo. You can easily spend a whole day (or more) in this area split between the Vatican Museums, St Peters, Vatican Gardens (need to book a tour) and the Castel St Angelo. All worth seeing.
• Three areas; Piazza Navona, Campo de Fiori, Trastevere.  No real megastar attractions although the open spaces of Piazza Navona & Campo de Fiori are well known and the areas are all nice and well worth visiting.
• Two areas light pink & green; Forum & Colosseum, Palatino, Circus Maximus, Aventino. Plenty of famous stuff in these areas. Mostly revolving around the Rome of Augustus, Julius Caesar, Nero and so forth. You have the obvious attractions from the names of the Roman Forum (including the Palatine hill area) & Colosseum but additionally on this day you can cover the Jewish ghetto area, the Capitoline hill plus its museums and the Bocca della Verita. If you want to skip the Aventine hill you won’t be missing too much aside from the “famous” keyhole view of St Peters. Similarly, the Circus Maximus is nothing like what it was in its heyday, now little more than a long oval field, but it lies between the Bocca and the Forum / Colosseum anyway so you’re not going out of you way to see it.

Each of these four trips can be as long or short as you like between half a day and a long day/evening. The Vatican and the Forum are the longest both in terms of walking required and with the most ‘must see’ attractions. The other two are less intensive.

There are many museums in Rome but if, like us, you can only handle a max of two museums then do the Vatican and those on Capitoline Hill as mentioned above. What you don’t get from those is a simple understanding of the evolution and history of Rome as a city, which would be nice, but I have no idea where to find that. Rome’s history is so big it might not even be possible to summarise it in an easily digestible touristic format. Of the two I mention I suppose the highlights would be the Sistine Chapel at the end of the Vatican Museum and the original of the Wolf with Romulus and Remus (the one outside is a copy) inside the Capitoline Museum but both have much more to offer. Best view over the Forum is from inside the Capitoline at basement level.

I hope this has been helpful and enjoy your trip!

The ticket also included entry to the museums and Sistine chapel so we wound our way through the maze of sculptures and paintings. Most of the time the building itself is more impressive than the exhibits.

After exiting the museum we walked around to St Peter’s square and then into the basilica. Yes, we did “do” the tomb of John Paul II, now upstairs in the main arena flanked by Popes, Pius XI and Pius XII.

To top off a religious day we had dinner with a priest, old school friend of M, who has been here for six years and is currently finishing off his doctorate based somewhere on the Aventine hill.

After that came the main purpose of today, a walk around the area called Trastevere on the other side of the river, south of the Vatican. It’s a nice area with many winding streets, small boutique shops and cafes. At the centre is a very nice church Santa Maria in Trastevere one of the oldest churches in Rome going back to about 220.

After this we headed up the river and wandered around the Castel Sant’Angelo, originally built as a Mausoleum for Hadrian and his family and now better known from Dan Brown books and films.

Tomorrow is a tour of the Vatican gardens, Vatican Museum and St Peters.

Did you know most of the columns here were not made in Rome? Despite their indisputable construction skills the Romans were unable to make columns in anything other than slices joined together with pins so if you see ones made in one piece it came from either Egypt or Greece. Most of those in the Forum area are Greek, the ones out front of the Pantheon came from Egypt. That’s a lot of hard work to roll them to the Nile, ship to the port of Ostia in Italy and then up the Tiber before unloading near the mausoleum of Augustus and rolling to final location. Apparently the current Pantheon was built by Hadrian on the site of the one built by Agrippa, whose name appears on the front. Also vaguely interesting is that the color of the marble used in any particular building indicates how far the Roman Empire had grown by the time of construction.

Today we headed south from the hotel. We picked up Bernini’s elephant “Pulcino Della Minerva” followed by the turtle fountain and then the Jewish ghetto. What city is complete without a Jewish ghetto, eh? I’m worried about the way Jewish ghettos become comparable with Irish pubs as good places for tourists to visit, with the key difference being that most of the time they are actually sites associated with something Jewish (oppression usually) whereas the Irish connections are often tenuous at best.

This ghetto was following the same formula as most others, tall buildings left in poor (but trendy) condition with numerous restaurants and cafes to choose from. We had a nice coffee stop at one in the morning and a not so great meal stop on our way back. Golden rule – if you eat at anywhere within eyesight of an attraction you’re going to get crap food for a high price. My crap food, Kosher of course, consisted of luke-warm chick pea soup followed by anchovies baked in grass. Similar results were had by all and it cost €70. We know from the last two evenings we can get good home-made pasta and stuff for less than €50. That’s it with the well located eateries!

From the Jewish area we crossed the Tiber and back again passing what remains of the Ponte Emilio, the oldest stone bridge in Rome from the 2nd century BC. By then we were upon the Boca della Verita so we had to stick our hand in its mouth. Then off to the Circus Maximus, once a giant chariot racing stadium and general place of entertainment for around 150,000 spectators, now a pretty boring patch of grass between the Aventine and Palatine hills.

On our way to the colosseum we passed the entrance to the Palatine hill and decided to take a look. Having just missed the free guided tour we hijacked another tour which brought to life an otherwise relatively dull hill full of rocks. The original settlement of Rome and the etymological origin of the word palace there have been people living there since 1,000 BC including several emperors of the Roman Empire such as Augustus (adopted son of Julius Caesar and first emperor of Rome), Tiberius & Domitian. You can see why they lived there aside from the historical reasons, the atmosphere was lovely up there. Fresh scented air and orange groves, must be nice in the summer.

From there we dropped down and did the colosseum, still impressive the second time around. After that we’d had our fill for one day and decided to skip the main part of the forum, which we have done before anyway and headed slowly back to camp.

I was going to mention the ridiculous number of law enforcement people in Rome but reading up on it it seems this is well known and so nothing unusual for Italy at least. They are everywhere, in great numbers. Are we expecting an attack by an army of embittered illegitimate Berlusconis?

Law enforcement in Italy is provided by eight separate police forces, six of which are national groups in Italy. During 2005 in Italy, the number of active police officers from all agencies totaled 324,339, the highest number in the European Union both overall and per capita, twice the number of agents in the similarly sized United Kingdom

Tomorrow is another day.

Copyright ICS MMXII

Dress code here is mixed. The Romans, smart ones at least, walk around with jackets and ties, waistcoats, light outer jacket, heavy topcoat, scarves, hats, glasses, pipe or cigar, shiny shoes. The gypsies selling this year’s hit of flying illuminated plastic crap are mostly wearing jeans and sweatshirts that have not been washed for a month or two with an anorak and sneakers. The tourists are wearing all sorts of stuff depending on where they come from, which seems to be predominantly Australia. I asked an Aussie couple who wanted me to snap them why there were so many of their country folk here and was told it might be the exchange rate.

Weather is a mix of sunshine and cloud. No rain as yet, unlike Paris last year. When the sun is out it’s pretty warm and when not it can be quite chilly so you end up dressing in layers so you can adjust as the day goes by.

Post about today’s adventures coming soon.