Roma

Buon giorno from Italia,

So here we are in Italy, after planning the trip for so long, and then changing our plans and for a while being unsure if we were actually coming. We arrived on a Tuesday and quite promptly got ourselves lost in Rome. Just so you know, there are two different bus \ train stations in Rome called Aurelia which you can get to from the Termini station. One of them is just Stazione Aurelia, while the other is Valle Aurelia. Don’t get them confused. They are both in the district of Aurelia, but they are not all that close to each other, at least when you’re carrying a giant rucksack and feeling shell shocked by all the traffic, noise, and graffiti. Anyway, we ended up arriving about two hours late to the camping site (Camping Village Roma, run by Plus Hostels). This turned out to be a nice place, and we recommend it for anyone considering staying fairly cheaply in Rome. Not in the best part of town, but not the worst either. During peak season, a shuttle leaves every twenty minutes or so for the Vatican Museum. Read more on their website.

Day two found us standing at the entrance to the Vatican Museum, bewildered by the monumental scale of the place and by the crowds of people pressing through it. The visit to the museum was like a refresher course in art history. There’s no way to describe the Vatican Museum without minimizing the grandeur and beauty of the buildings and their contents. If you can ever go, you’ve got to do it. There’s nothing like seeing those sculptures and paintings for yourself and imagining the hands and tools that shaped them so many years ago. One of the highlights of our time there was visiting the Sistine Chapel.

with the Nile

famous sculptures of some Roman guys

the map room (it's like being inside a geography book)

the ceiling of a dome

a painted ceiling at the Vatican Museum

at St Peters (no Pope)

Day three we went to the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine Hill. We could have easily spent another day or two exploring that whole complex. It felt so strange to walk on the same paving stones that people were walking on at the time of Christ. We found the Colosseum especially amazing and spent a couple hours inside imagining what it was like to be there two thousand years ago. Probably the Colosseum was our favourite of all we saw that day.

On the third day, which happened to be April 1^st, we were supposed to make the train trip to Tarquinia and the bus connection to Tuscania. However, the Italian transportation system shut down for a strike, so we got to spend a day at the campsite reading about the history of the Colosseum, eating a full tub of ice cream and getting shut out of our room twice (but we still recommend the place we were staying because it’s cheap and the people were pretty nice about opening the door for us).

So on the fourth day we arrived at our first Italian host, Casa Caponetti. This is essentially a big organic olive grove and livery (horse farm) that is converting a part of its land into a kind of park with trails and picnic areas. Stay tuned for more stories and photos from our time here and our adventures in the countryside around about.