Realising how little history NZ has in Rome

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Greg: After a long train ride all the way from Positano, we we met our AirBnB host at his local wine shop, to find they had a mixup and couldn't let out the advertised room. However, they offered to let us use their own apartment for the 3 days instead - so we got upgraded to a sweet 1 bedroom apartment within 5 minutes walk of the Colosseum!

As it was getting late we shot out in our travelling clothes, and ended up in a small intimate family restaurant for dinner. It was a bit out of our league but hunger conquered all and we chowed down on yet some more amazing pasta and meat dishes.



Our first morning in Rome took us on a walking tour around the city, starting from the Spanish steps, going via the Pantheon (one of my highlights so far, huuugely tall with a massive hole at the top for light - glad we got in while dry!) and ending up at a packed St Peter's square in the Vatican city. Not realising that this was the first big city that actually warranted use of the metro, we then walked 45minutes just to find a local artisan bar for some well deserved lunchtime craft beer, before walking all the way back to check out the Vatican museum.. it would have been really interesting to have a pedometer on by now! After seeing some pretty amazing paintings we located the bar we meant to find earlier, and were instantly besotted with the place.. Open Baladin Roma has a seriously good selection from the wall of beer bottles behind the bar... not to mention roughly 35 taps rotating the fresh stuff!

Feeling fairly pleased with ourselves after a few pints (and some gelato to make the trip bearable of course!) we made our way home past the supermarket, bought a £2 bottle of wine and some ingredients, before proceeding to attempt our first on-road cooking experience. To be fair it actually turned out really nice, and we were definitely much closer to cooking the proper "al-dente" pasta we had been gorging on recently.



The next day started with the intent of getting some Roman ruins under our belt. Making a beeline for the Palatine Hill we spent the whole morning exploring the area, gardens and finally the Roman forum. A quick pizza/lasagne/wine lunch (standard!) later we made our way to the Colosseum, which has to be experienced rather than explained, but you could just feel the history of the place, there was a lot of oohing and aahing from most angles around the arena.

Checking back in to our place late afternoon we donned some tops with slightly more sleeve to them, and wandered our way back to the town centre past Trevi fountain and the spanish steps again - finding the understated restaurant "Casa" by the rivers which was a perfect ending to the night.

But wait, we hadn't had dessert yet! :p We made our way home via Gioletti, italy-famous gelato with history dating back to 1900, this was the real deal - it even had two counters, one to buy a ticket and one to redeem it for your chosen gelato! Flavours beyond belief (and a queue to match), we did have an awww moment when Kim found out her queue neighbour had been coming here with her husband for over 20 years routinely for their weekly gelato together, wouldn't mind that as a date night!



There was one last thing we couldn't miss doing before leaving the great city of Rome, which was see St Peters basilica itself! After an early start to beat the enormous queues, we spent a good hour just wandering around the mammoth cathedral - by far the biggest and most memorable to date. We then said our goodbyes to Rome, got a couple of sneaky pizzas for the ride and jumped on a 4hour bus to Siena. Ciao!

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