Roma Capitale

Wednesday (January 1st) we decided to go to the colosseum first to beat the rush, but it was closed because of the holiday (1 of 3 days in the whole year it's closed!). So we ended up walking around a bunch of the ruins of the old Roman Forums, to the Pantheon, getting more gelato, and seeing the Trevi Fountain. As the day went on. the crowds got thicker and thicker. We never experienced crowds like that anywhere else in our entire 5 months in Europe. It was like the density of walking out of a Jazz game everywhere we went. If it were the beginning of our travels I think we would have tried to endure, but after 3+ weeks of touristing, our patience had run thin. So we went back to our hotel to make dinner and watch Roman Holiday and eat our New Years cake that had been in every grocery store in Italy for the holidays.

Trevi Fountain

The Pantheon from 126 AD (crazy!)

Misc ruins

More ruins

The Colosseum - attempt 1

Thursday, we woke up, ate our Cheerios, and went straight to the Colosseum to find a HUGE line. We decided to revamp our plan and got on the Metro to the Vatican City instead. We got to the Vatican with about 20,000 other people (but really, that's how many people visit per day during high season) and decided to start with the Vatican Museums which include the Sistine Chapel. On our way there, a lady started telling us about a guided tour which would get us straight into the museums with a tour guide, then would get us straight into St. Peters Basilica without waiting in the line, which was a 3 hour wait according to her. We were sold. We both agree it was worth it, our tour guide pointed out lots of things we wouldn't have noticed or appreciated and gave us a lot of background info about the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel was amazing to see and was definitely a highlight of the day. Pictures aren't really allowed but we did snap a crappy selfie (see below).

After the Sistine Chapel, our tour guide led us straight to St. Peters where the tour itself ended but skipped the line. We spent an hour or two wandering around the MASSIVE church (I think I read it's the 2nd biggest in the world). The detail and extravagance of the place was unbelievable. Every inch is covered in some form of carving, painting, or monument. There's one part of the chapel where the say Peter himself is buried, which I didn't know before. One other crazy part of the Vatican was St. Peter's Square. That place is huge! When you see picture of all the people gathered together there, that is a LOT of people.

St Peter's Square

St Peter's Basillica

After the Vatican, we walked to the Spanish Steps. I'm not really sure why they're so famous, they just are. It's the place Audrey Hepburn sits and eats gelato in Roman Holiday if you've seen that (we’d just watched it, so it made them a little more interesting.) We took  pictures with the steps, then found a place to eat. We had a roman roasted artichoke, then Spencer had another pasta and I had veal with roasted potatoes, which was really good right up until Spencer told me what veal was (poor lambs :(). My food was slow to cook so they brought us another appetizer while we waited, bonus! We also made our way back to the Trevi Fountain to throw our coins in and take a few more pictures. On our way to the Trevi Fountain we got conned into buying a rose from a street vendor.

Friday we got up, packed, checked out of our hotel, and went back to the Colosseum (for the 4th time!). Don't worry, we were more successful this time. The line was actually far worse that day than it had been the day before. Luckily, I read a trick online: The ticket for the Colosseum is good for the interior of the Colosseum as well as Palatine Hill and the Roman Forums. I read the best option is to buy your tickets at the Forum and do that first, and then you can pretty much walk into the Colosseum. So we did that, we still had to wait in line for about an hour, but I know the other one would've been much longer. The forums were cool, they're essentially just thousands of years of Roman rubble with a few things standing here and there. If you've seen pictures from Rome of some lone pillars, this is the spot. It was the main governmental area as well as the home of the emperors during the peak of the Roman Empire.

After a couple hours we went into the Colosseum, and I must say, it was pretty satisfying to walk past the hundreds (maybe even thousands, they say 13-16,000 people come in per day) of people still in line and walk straight in. We decided to do an audio guide, which was fun and helped us understand the Colosseum a lot more. It's actually a really gruesome place if you think about it, so it was sad but fascinating to learn about. After that, we walked to pick up our bags from our hotel, bought some yucky pizza for dinner, and went to the train station to head to Naples.

New Year's Eve 2014

I realize it's slightly beyond pathetic to post this entry almost a year after it happened...but I'm so close to having fully documented our adventures.  Yesterday, Spencer made a comment about me loving to start projects but being slow to finish them, I guess this is Exhibit A...or B...or C...  Anyway, here we go.

After leaving the monastery on Tuesday morning (New Year’s Eve), we headed to one last hilltop city called Orvieto. The GPS kept guiding us on all these windy scenic routes (to the point where I was getting car sick and Spencer was jokingly shouting "Hey Italians learn how to make a straight road!"). The majority of the time on these roads we could see the Motorway (freeway) nearby. But we kept following the GPS anyway; after all, she always got us where we needed to go. On our way to Rome, we figured out it was because the GPS was set on "avoid toll roads". We think this setting ultimately made for a lot of long-cuts in the middle of the countryside during our 4 days with the car, but after paying one €7.00 toll to get to Rome, I think we're glad.

 

So back to Orvieto, we got to the town and walked around and took pictures for a bit. The highlight of the town is their cathedral, but I think we are both cathedraled out so we weren't too excited about this. We did decide to get ourselves one last Tuscany meal for lunch. We walked around and found a place with a good TripAdvisor rating and decided to eat there. Spencer got a pasta with wild boar sauce, I had a pesto and tomato pasta, and we split a Truffle (mushroom) bruschetta, they all tasted delicious!! Hooray for at least ONE good pasta meal, 5th time's the charm.

This cathedral looked very similar to the cathedral in Siena

After Orvieto, we got on the Motorway and drove straight to Rome. I had booked our rental car to be dropped off in the heart of Rome at the train station, so poor Spencer had to navigate the absolutely insane Roman traffic. It took us a while to figure out where to drop the car off, but we figured it out eventually. After dropping the car off we went to our hotel, which was a breath of fresh air. It had a kitchen! And a comfy bed! Since we had a kitchen, we decided to go buy some groceries (we were pretty excited to have a nice bowl of cold cereal).

Around 10 we set out for the New Years Eve celebration in Rome. The main crowd of people was grouped near the Colosseum, so we could see the laser show countdown projected on the walls of the Colosseum and the fireworks shot above it. It was really fun counting down with everybody (in Italian of course) and watching the fireworks, mostly just because it's such a once in a lifetime opportunity. 

The less glamorous parts were the alcohol being spilled down my pants and shoes, the cigarette smokers in every direction, and the constant stream of guys trying to sell us flashing 2014 pins or bottles of alcohol. Once the clock struck midnight, everyone uncorked their alcohol to celebrate. The lady next to us offered us some, which we declined. I told Spencer it was probably just like Martinellis because they were giving it to their young kid, but we still said no. A minute later she insisted on giving me a cup. I tried to ask her if it was non-alcoholic, I think she was trying to tell me it was, but it was all lost in translation. I ended up slowly dumping it on the ground when they weren't looking.

There were a couple other people there with us.

Siena, Pienza, & Montepulciano

Monday morning we explored Siena a little bit. After about 2 hours, we felt we'd seen the major sights and were ready to hit the road. This was one of those places we would've appreciated more with a tour guide. There's so much history there, but we were oblivious to most of it.

After Siena we drove about an hour to another old hill top village called Pienza. Once again, we were amazed at how authentic and old it seemed. We had just enough daylight left after Pienza to hit Montepulciano, yet another hilltop village. This one seemed a bit more modernized but still awesome with amazing views of the Tuscan landscape. Fun fact: this is the town where the climax of Twilight 2 (New Moon) was filmed.

The real fun on Monday happened when we tried to find our hotel. First, the GPS couldn't find the address. So we looked up a nearby street and used deductive reasoning to find the beautiful Tuscan villa. Spencer went to check if this was the right place, it wasn't. The man didn't speak any English, but luckily his wife did. She told us we needed to go down two streets, then turn right. So we passed a street, found a long driveway/street and turned right. This place looked much more promising though a bit shabbier. We were able to walk in the front door. On our right was a big room with a billiards table, on our left was a memo board and a hallway. So we started walking down the hallway because it looked like the best option. After a couple twists and turns, we came across two old men, one in a wheelchair, and another shuffling down the hall in his slippers. We awkwardly turned around and made our way back to the door with the slipper guys shuffling behind us. In the main entrance we looked around a little more for a reception desk. No luck, but the slipper guy did catch up to us and greeted us with a dentured grin. At this point we determined we were in an old folks home, not a hotel.

So we figured we needed to go one more street. Here we found a church, but I'd actually read that the hotel was in a monastery, there were lots of cars, and the name matched up perfectly. So we walked confidently to the front door where we heard...a church choir. Surely this couldn't be it either. But as we were walking back to the car, a sliding car gate opened. We thought this may be a sign and started walking inside it; this led us down a dark path in the shadow of a church. I felt like I was in Scooby Doo. The back of the church had more lights, but only one car and no other signs of life. So we booked it back to the car. We decided to drive up the road even further, but now we were on a one-way farm lane. I looked through my phone and realized I had a picture of the hotel…it WAS the church. We turned around, drove right up to the doors, and entered the church, determined to ask where the entrance to the hotel was. Unfortunately they were in the middle of some important looking rituals. We walked around the exterior a little more and found a doorbell; I pushed it and heard the guy in the speaker say "Whitney?" Apparently this was the place. He told us (in very broken English) to drive through the gate (so that WAS the right place). He came out and opened these double doors that looked like dungeon doors, not lobby doors, to let us in.

The hotel really was an old monastery and was super creepy. It was clean and comfy, it was just intimidating to walk into the long, stone, dark hallway (the lights flipped off after about 2 minutes). Once we'd gotten used to it, it wasn't as creepy but the whole place was freeeezing cold. We had a heater in our room but it didn't really do the job. I guess that's the problem with buildings made of stone, no insulation. Luckily we were supplied with extra blankets so we piled those on and made due. Neither of us slept great because it was just so cold. It was like camping when you wake up and your nose is all cold. Anyway, that place made for some great stories but we were happy to leave.

For dinner, we tried our TripAdvisor trick again, unfortunately both the restaurants with really good reviews were closed. So, we found another nearby place. The menu looked decent and we figured since we're out of touristville it has to be good. Wrong. It was disgusting. I gagged down most of my food, but Spencer could only get a couple bites of his down. The real bummer is our waitress didn't speak English, so how do you say "This is the worst food we've ever had, will you please bring us something different or give us a discount?" Neither of us wanted to. So we paid, left, and went to McDonalds. God bless America.