Rome, part 1

Our family of four spent four days exploring Rome. This post is on the first two days of exploring.

We arrived with Jason not feeling well and Ava still coughing. Our AirBnb unfortunately wasn't very convenient to the center of the city and all the sights (because places in the center were quite expensive, so we opted for something a bit more affordable). Getting to it on our arrival after a big travel day wasn't easy. We hadn't been in a really big city in quite a while, so packing in like sardines into the metro was a wake-up call.

If you have been to Rome, or are planning to go to Rome, you're probably going on a typical vacation from North America to Italy for 1-2 weeks... or something similar. You've probably been planning for months, reading about the sights, planning your lodging and sightseeing and transportation and tickets well in advance.

But we are just not able to keep up with that kind of planning anymore. Other than booking a place to stay a while ago (and just booking it based on price without knowing much else about the city), we really arrived without much of a plan at all. I literally spent the train ride from Florence to Rome reading about 'sights to see in Rome' and looking at the different tourist cards and tickets you can buy. And I got a bit confused about what might make sense for us, since it's not the summer and it's not that busy yet. No particular tourist cards seemed very appealing to me.

So we woke up on our first morning and decided to go to the Colosseum and see if we could buy tickets. Many, many tour guides told us different information about when tickets would be available so that we would buy their tour or their guiding offer. There were no 'day of' tickets available online left for the day. Actually, there weren't any tickets available online on the actual website for several days - not until after we left! So we scrambled a bit to figure out what tourist cards, guided tours, or packages could offer us tickets to get inside, and we booked something for the next morning as a part of a tourist card.

We spent the rest of the day walking around, checking out the Trevi Fountain (which I loved / thought was beautiful), the Spanish steps (which we weren't particularly excited about), walking along the Tiber River to see the Castle Sant Angelo, and then Piazza Navona. That plaza has three fountains and great people watching. We sat in the sun and just enjoyed the fountains for a few minutes and it was quite lovely.

Trevi Fountain

Trevi Fountain

Spanish steps

Fountain at the bottom of Spanish Steps

Tiber River

Castel Sant 'Angelo

Fountain at Pizza Navona

Piazza Navona

 After that we went to the Pantheon, which was cool to see with its hole-in-the-center domed roof. Unfortunately after that, it took us a long time to get home as our bus never came! But we figured out a plan B. Rachel fell asleep on the bus, which is telling for our overall travel fatigue at this point.

Pantheon outer ceiling

The Pantheon's light source = hole in the ceiling

Pantheon

Pantheon

Tired tourist

Asleep on the bus tired tourist

So on Day 2 we were back at the Colosseum, ready with our online 'tourist card' digital tickets for 2 adults. Since kids <18 are free entry, I didn't buy them tourist cards. We showed up for our 9:30am entry time at about 9:10, knowing we had to show our digital tickets to an office to get paper tickets before the security line. But it turned out that the office we had to get the paper tickets from was 15 min walk away! Oops! We were now wondering what would happen with the timing of our entry if we were quite late... so instead of walking, we hopped on 2 electric scooters and started zipping along. Jason and Rachel's scooter ploughed the way through other walkers / traffic and navigated, while Ava and I followed. It was kind of scary but super fun, and the kids thought it was a blast. 

We got to the ticket office and learned that 2 adult tickets weren't enough. We also needed to pay to secure kids tickets for the 9:30am slot.... and now we were starting to feel frustrated with all the ticket and scam hassle that was going on. But we paid for the two kids, grabbed our 4 paper tickets, and scooted back to the security line to go inside the Colosseum.

Being inside was cool, and I'm glad we did it. It was particularly neat to read about some of the history and the different uses of the structure over time. Other arena structures we've seen in Europe (France/Greece/Turkey/Italy) all had smooth floors and many of them were still in operation as a performance venue or similar. So it was interesting to see the compartments / rooms underneath the floors where in the past there may have been animals like lions.

After some time in the Colosseum, we walked around Palantine Hill and the Roman Forum and checked out the ancient rubble from previous palaces and columns. 

Then we caught a bus back to our neighbourhood and had lunch at a FANTASTIC Thai food place. I'd say it's a toss up between the scooter ride and the thai lunch for what people liked the most today :)