Europa Day 46

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Day 46

Another day of exploring the back streets of Rome. We head towards the Piazza Venezzia via backstreets. Find all sorts of interesting places as we wander from one little street to another. Shops, little shops where men are re-upholstering chairs, metal working shops, all working in very confined spaces but some sort of organization exists.

We eventually get near the Piazza Venzzia but there are flashing blue lights everywhere up the road we are now on. Oh oh. Looks like a bike accident ahead. There are police everywhere with a woman lying on the road - doesn't look too bad, but there is chaos with people, cars, buses, police. This place has about 6 roads feeding into it and the accident is on one of the out roads so you can imagine the mess they are in.

There are way too many police blowing whistles trying to get control with everyone basically ignoring them. Eventually an ambulance pulls up but it already has a patient so it goes. Another on comes about 5 minutes later but the woman is left on the road with police on the gutter, and cars and buses passing between them and the woman on the road. As one woman said, this is worse than London.

It took over half an hour for the traffic to get back to normal again, not sure how the lady on the road went but the care she wasn't getting on the road said something for the Italian way of looking after their patients.......

The only good thing was that I was able to get into the middle of the road safely to get some photos of the memorial to the unknown soldier (very impressive building with two pillars that have bronze statues of chariots with 4 horses - stands out in the Rome sky).

We then climbed the stairs to this place and did the museum to very old wars and got to the top and had drinks in a cool place. Looked over the edge and noticed a Dali exhibition next door, so we did that next.

His works are very odd, but this exhibition was well done with lots of TV snips of Dali interviews or words from him. Even made sense to me......

Sat on the edge of the Piazza having a beer watching the traffic and people go past. Police everywhere but couldn't find out why, until we walked down the next street we hadn't been down. Stopped at a closed off piazza and asked more police what was happening. Turns out we had stopped at the back of their lower house of parliament and they were sitting to vote on new labour laws which were not going to be very popular. Police had been brought in to back up the locals. They were all over the place.

Found our way back to the hotel via the river and then off to tea at a locals restaurant - very tiny but nice. A walk around Piazza Novonna and then home to watch the soccer between Spain and Portugal. Another penalty goal decider....

Tomorrow night Italy play Germany in the other semi final so we have to get organized early so we can watch that before we leave on Friday morning..

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