Saturday : sunny

Well the hotel room was massive and so was the included breakfast, it's a pity we had to change hotels. The new hotel isn't too bad though, it just doesn't come breakfast, but for 40 euro cheaper per night we were ok with that.

We left the room and walked to the Spanish steps, stopping off to grab a coffee along the way. It was very nice to sit on the stairs for awhile in the sun.

Next was Trevi fountain, and it was a fair bit busier, there were people everywhere around the fountain, throwing money in the water. We took our pictures and admired from the front stairs of a neighboring church for awhile.

From there it was only a short walk to the Pantheon, and this place was one cool 2000 year old tomb, now a church. It's very pretty inside and out, it has the worlds largest unreinforced concrete dome roof. Well it's not much of a roof when there's a huge hole in the centre, and I'm sure this place was in a movie too.

We then went to Piazza Navona, it was a longer walk to get there. We wandered around the square, there were markets setup, more fountains and mimes.

We then crossed the river and took all these nice lanes and squares filled with restaurants to the top of Gianicolo hill. From the top it had great views over Rome and the Vatican.

We were up there for almost a couple hours, after the break we made our way back down the hill. Past a lot of ruins, including an old arena that's older than the colosseum.

We made it back to Piazza del Campidoglio before sunset, and took the very nice Cordonata staircase which Michelangelo designed. At the top there was the capital museum, another bug fountain. To the left was II Vittoriano a huge building which has a story about an unknown solider and another museum. From here we got our first view of the colosseum, we took the elevator to the roof and the night view got better. We could see the hole town and all the lit up ruins.

It was getting late and we hadn't had dinner, we exited via Piazza Venezia and had a short walk back towards the hotel till we came across a nice footpath, corner restaurant which had lit up church views infront of us.

Within the hour after dinner we were back at the hotel, and we used the net for a bit before bed. I got to speak to the folks for the first time in almost five months, it was a short but sweet convo, I'll have to tee up another one soon.