Having spent a happy hour on my first morning in Rome shooting away at the Colosseum (with my camera, obviously, I haven't completely lost my marbles), I approached the entrance gates, which seemed strangely queue free, and engaged the guard there in the following conversation:

"Excuse me, where do I buy tickets for the Colosseum?"

"Is close"

"I'm sorry?" "Colosseum, she is close. Is strike"

I knew I was going to regret my next question even before it was out of my mouth: "Why?"

The man shrugged: "Who knows. Wake up, think 'is strike'. Is no reason."

Fair enough. I thought about asking if I'd somehow woken up in France this morning, but decided that this would just confuse him unnecessarily. On the plus side, of course, it made it a very cheap day, walking about Rome taking photos and occasionally ducking into a coffee shop for a latte. I still had the next day to see the inside of the Colosseum and explore the Palatine, which I couldn't quite remember whether was a horse, a typeface or a senator from Star Wars. And, of course, there's the Pantheon. And the Vatican. And Piazza Navona, which is apparently the most beautiful piazza in the whole of Rome even though I've never even heard if it before this week. The list goes on, it would've been hard enough with 2 full days of dusk to dawn exploration, Christ knows how I ever thought I was going to do it in one!

I couldn't even walk far in one go as the heat was literally peeling the skin from my bones, and as the strike was also effecting the Rome Metro, the usually swift and efficient underground train system which should have been whisking me from ancient monument to ancient monument was rendered nothing more than a series of closed and padlocked gates all over the city with hastily scribbled apologies tacked to them. Even if I tried to make my way somewhere on foot, I was regularly blocked by hundreds of marching teenagers holding indecipherable banners, and police roadblocks set up to keep the peace and prevent cars from running down protesters (or, presumably, protesters running over cars).

The Italians seem to have something of a love affair with Ice Cream, as there seem to be at least 3 gelato shops on every street and each one sells at least 30 flavours. I sat in one this morning, eating a banana flavour cone which I had finally found after spending some considerable amount of time wondering why "ananas" flavour didn't taste much like banana (ananas means pineapple), and this particular gelato vendor had no less than 120 flavours on display. One of them was pitch black with gooey lumps in and a strangely oily complexion - I decided to give it a miss. I was pretty sure it was some sort of exotic fruit - but to be fair, if I ever encounter any sort of exotic fruit which is black, lumpy and oily all at the same time, I'm quite likely to give that a miss too!

I still haven't really managed to work out how the street crossings here work - I wouldn't have previously thought it possible to make understanding the function of a green or red man on a traffic light in any way difficult, but the Italians seem to have managed it. On nearly every intersection, the traffic seems to stop well before the green man appears, and then when you do finally get the "walk" signal you step out into the street just as all the traffic moves off and makes you scuttle back to the kerb. Either that, or you are crossing the road on the green man with all the traffic stopped, when a huge articulated lorry sails around the corner and almost knocks you flat, screeching to a halt while the driver swears at you as though you should know that articulated lorries are allowed to go around corners against red lights.

Every available space in the piazzas or along the sides of the road is occupied by salesmen with blankets laid out on the ground covered in trinkets, camera tripods or gadgets. Their patter, it has to be said, leaves a lot to be desired, usually consisting of a blank stare as you walk by, a half-hearted attempt to show you something and a monotone "is very good, you want". Most of them seem to have children's toys, which is very odd as very few of their customers even remotely resemble children and the under 5s aren't generally known for their love of all things Roman, but nevertheless that seems to be the way of things here. In particular, two things have got all the street vendors excited at the moment - a thing which you throw high in the air which lights up and creates a streak in the sky as it moves, and a squishy plastic creature which you throw at the floor in order to flatten it before it magically reforms into a creature again. They generally seem to be turned on by throwing things. Personally, I don't think anyone is there to sell anything - I just think they like playing with toys! Back in Venice, there were gangs of these people wherever I went, usually selling brand name hangbags (which each salesman manages to somehow carry around by the dozen), at prices which don't so much say "brand name" as "you tell me what brand you like, I go away and stamp it on for you!" On one occasion, I was walking along a side street when one of these salesmen stepped out from an alleyway. Immediately, and I've never seen anything like it in my life, he was surrounded by about 20 women all screaming and ripping the bags from his arms and shouting "I must have, how much, I give 10 euro". Clearly, it's more about looking like your bag is from Posh of Beverly Hills than whether or not it actually is - which is an argument which sort of falls flat on it's face if everyone knows that all the bags their friends are sporting are fake, don't you think? Besides, nobody will believe you when you finally manage to save up enough to get a real brand name bag, will they? Ever heard the story of the little girl who cried Armani?

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.