Tam & Peg’s Excellent Adventure

Rome, Day 1

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Our trip is nearing its end, but in no way is it winding down.
We arrived in Rome last evening and got to our hotel around 9PM, checking in to one of the most beautiful hotels and rooms we’ve ever seen! We have an unbelievable 180-degree view of Rome from our 6th floor balcony, which includes the beautiful and ornate dome on St. Peter’s Basilica, which is quite near. We even had a waxing moon rising over the city last night to top it off.
We had played with our cameras, trying to get an evening picture of St. Peter’s Basicala, but we didn’t have the right tripod for the long lens.
Our 3-hour walking tour commenced this morning at 10, but we left pretty early, not being sure how much time to allow for transportation and for finding our meeting point, which was adjacent to the Coliseum. As we’ve discovered so many times on our trip, the experience of seeing it for ourselves was more than what we expected; there seems to be some “added dimension.” W e had a very knowledgeable guide whose ease and familiarity with her subjects was very impressive. We both wished we could hear and understand her better than we could, but we were able to improve our understanding of Ancient Rome quite a lot as we wandered for three hours among the ruins of the Coliseum, Palatine Hill and along “Via Scara” or “Sacred Way,” the main path through the Roman Forum. It was really very interesting, if a bit exhausting up and down hills and steps all over the place. We took thousands of pictures, but we won’t bore you with too many.
After leaving our tour, we went on another open-air bus that drove around Rome allowing us to get a feeling for the layout of the city and its important sites. Given our short stay, it is a good way to at least see things we won’t have time to visit… this trip. That filled up a couple of hours, after which we returned to the hotel to put our feet up and watch our wonderful view of Rome for a bit. We’ll probably have dinner out tonight and tomorrow night we’ll repeat last night’s plan to eat Italian bread and salami on our balcony.