The Scroop's European Holiday: Day 38 Rome:

Today we wake up to a beautiful Rome day, a clear blue sky but it is just a little bit chilly. We have breakfast and get ready to leave the apartment and head down to catch the open top tour bus. We have done this in every city we have visited that has open top tour buses because it is the best way to get an immediate overview of the city and it helps us decide what we want to see in more detail later on. We get on the bus at the bus stop about 200m from our apartment and get moving. One thing becomes very apparent very quickly and that is we have a lot to try and see before we leave on Saturday arvo. This place is one attraction after another and there is no way we are going to be able to see it all before we leave so we are going to have to work out what we want to see and what gets missed out. Rome reminds us of Paris in the fact that there is just so much here. It is no way as pretty as Paris and it is not structured as well as Paris and I can only described it as an architectural grave yard with ruins and archaeological sites everywhere. But that is understandable when you realise that Rome was founded back in 753 BC. These guys were living here for 3 times longer than Australia has been around and that’s before we get to the AD part of time!!! That is extremely hard for me to grasp. The fact that there are so many ruins here makes the place look a little weird but it must be hard to build a city around so much history. Another thing that is very evident to us is there are a lot of little things scattered around the place like a statue on the corner of a building or a sculpture carved into a wall or a painting on a wall in the middle of nowhere and they are all still intact. I could imagine in Perth that some knob head would have smashed it or put graffiti all over it but it’s almost like even the knob heads over here respect the ancient parts of the city and it’s a no go zone or something. We finish a full route of the bus tour and decide to get off. We grab some stuff at the supermarket and take it back to the apartment. We don’t hang around we just change into warmer clothes because it is still chilly and head straight back out. We grab some lunch on the go and wander down to Piazza Navona. This is a great spot with lots of restaurants and artists selling their stuff. We just wander around before backtracking toward the Pantheon where we see people filing in through the front door so we join them. The Pantheon has this incredible front facade but the rest of it looks a bit like ruins so we were expecting the inside to be similar. The inside is in fact the reverse with amazing marble columns and the dome on top is massive. We sit and admire the place before getting out of there and moving on. We kept walking and decided to walk down and catch the green line of the open top tour bus. This takes you further south and out a bit further from the main centre. We walk to the stop which is about10 minutes away and ask the guy how long until it comes. He says around 35 minutes so we took a walk up these huge stairs around the back of this monument that lead to a church. We decide to pop inside and my god, we can’t believe this thing, it’s amazing. You would have had no idea from the outside that this church could be so amazing. We walk out and back to the green line bus only to realise our ticket doesn’t cover the green line, damn!! Never mind, back on the original bus for a spin until we decide to get back off again to go and explore the Trastevere area. This is an area on the other side of the river and it was very nice and worthy of another visit later we reckon. We head back and by this point we have covered some km’s. We get ready for dinner and head back down to the Pantheon to try and find a restaurant. We find a very nice spot at the front of the Pantheon where the food is great, the wine is fantastic (the red wine in Italy is the best we’ve ever had) there is entertainment in the piazza and we get an icecream before heading back to the apartment.