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Published: October 11th 2013
Flowering vine Villa Borghese
this was the only flower I found in the park whole park. There are small private gardens at the Villa.So it seems our Coliseum tour guide was spot on when she said October is a rainy month. The original forecast for this whole week was partly sunny to sunny, then it changed to rain Sun-Tue, then rain for the whole week. We went into Rome with the intention of visiting Villa Borghese which has a world famous art collection and a large park around it....supposed to be beautiful. We got off at the Flaminio station and started walking towards the villa....we knew we were in the right spot when we saw all the tour buses.
We passed the small artificial lake which was being dug up so only had the photo on a sign to see what it looked like when full of water. We passed other old fountains...long empty of water, small café, kids playground and were half way to the villa when it really started raining. Seeing as I left my umbrella at a the place where we had lunch after visiting the Vatican, I relied on my rain jacket to keep me dry...it failed. It was still raining when we reached the villa, only to find you had to purchase your tickets online and they were
sold out through next Tuesday....so much for spur of the moment visitors like us!!!! We walked back to the Flaminio metro stop via a slightly different route through the park....all trees, no flowers or flowering shrubs to brighten the landscape...a little disappointing. I found pictures online, mostly taken in the spring, showing formal gardens with tulips in bloom...we didn't find those or the Temple of Diana...the soaking rain literally damped our adventurous spirit and desire to walk the entire park.
We checked out various places to have lunch, there were many cafeteria type places along with the usual stand up bars/pizzerias. We found a place that was sit down inside....they had tablecloths on the tables so how bad could it be! We ordered water while we looked at the menu that advertised a "tourist menu"...a 3 course meal, no fish dishes included for a fixed price....we passed. I ordered the rigatone alla'matriciana...a red meat sauce with smoked bacon....YUMMO...Freddie had their gnocchi in a red meat sauce...they only offer gnocchi on Thursday so we figured they were homemade. We also got a carafe of their red house wine....it came in a cute little clear glass picture and was OK.
Riding arena
An awesome area to ride horses, much bigger than official size dressage ring. I noticed they had a dessert called "torte della nonna"....Grandmother's cake....and we decided to share a piece of that with two lemoncellos. The cake was a traditional torte with slivered almonds on top, dusted with powdered sugar. The recipes I found online for this used a sheep's milk ricotta....I had to fight Fred for my fair share of the piece of cake...it was really good!!!!!
Thankfully it had stopped raining, the train ride home was uneventful. We stopped at the Sma market on our walk home from the train station, to stock up on gelato. Dinner was Lizzie's favorite of hotdogs and beans...she's so easy to please!!!!
We're waiting to see who wins game 5 of the AL West playoffs...no matter whether it's Oakland or Detriot...they're both excellent teams. Debbie and Craig get home tomorrow afternoon and our stay here comes to an end when we fly home on Sunday.
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