Dave & Meredith’s Travel Blog

We left Tuscany Saturday morning and are now at our apartment in Rome. We’re staying in a neighborhood called Trastevere which is very active at night with restaurants and bars. Below are two pictures from our window, one at night and the other in the morning when it is really quiet.

– Dave

When I rented a car for this trip, I knew I’d need room for four people and I knew I had to allow for a decent amount of luggage since some people would have been traveling already for a week or two and I would have a load of photo gear. At the car rental agency’s web site, I chose the minivan class which showed a picture of a Fiat minivan with the usual caveat phrase “or similar.” When Meredith and I arrived in Rome and went to the rental desk to pick up the car, we waited for what seemed longer than usual and then, instead of the attendant driving up to the desk with our car like he had for the other customers, he handed us a set of keys and said it was parked out side the building. Hmmm. First sign of trouble. We followed his directions down a few levels and out of the building. This is where the phrase “or similar” was stretched a bit. We came out onto a row of large, white mini-buses. This thing was huge and sat 8-10 people:

Il elefante bianco

For a moment I entertained thoughts of driving this around, especially the look that would be on our friends’ faces when we came back to the airport the next day to pick them up in this thing. But Meredith said, “no way” and we headed back up to the desk. The man’s eyes widened and Meredith said, “troppo grande!” We cleared up the confusion and ended up with a VW minivan that was “perfetto” and much more “similar” to the original I had rented.

– Dave

We’ve packed too much in to give you a play by play of our trip here. Also, since many of you have probably been to Rome, it seems silly to tell you all about the places we’ve seen. Instead, I’ll tell you about a few of my favorite moments from our visit in Rome:

• Getting lost on tiny cobblestone streets.
• Eating dinner ai fuori (outside) and listening to everyone around me speak Italian.
• Getting shooed into the world’s tiniest elevator with Dave, all of our luggage and our B&B host Norberto (seriously, one person shouldn’t even ride in this thing).
• Walking down the Roman Forum on the same stones that people walked on 2000 years ago. I took Latin in high school and learned about all of this 20 years ago, and I’ve been wondering why it’s taken me so long to come here and see it with my own eyes. Seeing all of these buildings and roads that were built during the rise and fall of Rome made me feel better – as if 20 years really wasn’t that long ago.
• Strolling down the Via Appia Antica on a warm sunny Sunday when cars aren’t allowed to drive there.

- Meredith

Here is the view from our window at our second B&B in the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome:

- Meredith

…and the same goes for our blog posts.

There’s so much to do here, and we’ve been trying to pack it all in. That has left little time for blogging, let alone thinking about what to post. I haven’t even written down everything we’ve done yet, but here is the quick and dirty laundry list.

Things we’ve visited inside and out:

• Colosseum
• Roman Forum
• Pantheon
• Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel
• St. Peter’s Basilica
• San Giovanni in Laterano (this was a surprise visit – we went in when we were walking by looking for a gelateria that is supposed to be the best in Rome – more on that in a subsequent post!)
• Catacombs of Domatilla (seriously creepy, except when the kids from Boston who were in the same tour group as us said, “hey, these big graves look like Bertucci’s pizza ovens!”)

Here are things we’ve seen while walking:

• Piazza Navona
• Campo dei Fiori
• Spanish Steps
• Vittorio Emanuele Monument and Campidoglio
• Castel Sant’Angelo
• Baths of Caracalla

- Meredith