The Real Deal

It took some time to recover from the trauma induced by the Vatican Museum, but being experienced travelers we rallied and decided to do something we’d never done before: buy tickets from one of those tourist buses that circle the city and let you hop on or off as you choose. We had only a day and a half in Rome before leaving for Sicily, our true destination on this trip. I’d intended for this short time in Rome to serve as a kind of reconnaissance mission, allowing us to get a feel for he city and develop an idea of what we’d like to do when we returned to see Rome properly. The bus seemed a good idea, letting us cover more of the city than we could on foot.

We took a coffee just off Piazza San Pietro while we waited for the bus to arrive and continued the ruination of our palates where it comes to good espresso. In Rome they only fill the tiny cup up half way, and that coffee is very strong and very good. So good in fact that I fear we may no longer find our Nespresso filling the bill. I suppose coffee has in common with wine that once you’ve tasted the really excellent stuff, it’s hard to go back to the everyday product.

We’d chosen the bus tour whose brochure we’d found in our hotel lobby, but I think that we’d have been better off to have compared the route of each of the at least four or five competitors before making our decision. Our bus’s route hit many of the high points, the Coliseum, lots of fountains and piazzas, etc. But part of the appeal is supposed to be that you can jump off and get back on as you wish, thus using the bus tour as a kind of cheap transportation around the city. For this use ours was nearly worthless. It took much longer than the stated hour and fifteen minutes to make its circuit, and since it only went in one direction, if you wanted to get to somewhere near the end of its path you’d get there faster by walking than riding the bus all the way around the city. So for a single use trip around town to see what was where, that was fine. But previous comments on taxis notwithstanding, we could have done a better tour of the city for fewer Euros in a cab.

Still, we did get where we wanted to go once, and sort of where we wanted to go a second time, which led to our getting lost and stumbling across this:



How we would’ve missed Il Foro Romano, the Roman Forum, if we hadn’t stumbled across it is a mystery, but I was amused to think of my first trip to New York City, where each time I turned a corner it seemed I found another iconic building or store. In Rome, turning a new corner reveals something a thousand or two years old that you had no idea was there. Having lived in Lyon and Paris, France, we were accustomed to finding things that were, by California standards, ancient. But Rome’s old stuff makes Paris look brand new, and the presence of these sudden ruins is a big part of what makes exploring Rome so much fun.