Ciao Senores et Senoras! We now consider ourselves multilingual (tongue in cheek here) as we now know how to say 1-2-3, hello, goodbye, please, thank you, ticket, exit, excuse me, mr, mrs and miss in 4 languages - soon to be 5. We've had to check ourselves on occasions when we're saying 'Bonjour' when in fact we should be saying 'Biongiorno'. However we haven't embarrassed ourselves too often.
Well, beautiful Roma - what can you say? We said arrivederci to our Kumuka bus tour, most of whom were continuing on the tour, and negotiated the Italian afternoon siesta and the Rome metro (it's cute as there's only two metro lines) to find our hotel. We've hit the jackpot with all of our hotels so the investigation prior to the trip has paid off. And again thanks to Trip Advisor.
Rome is warmish at this time of year - probably like Brisbane with little variation between minimum and maximum temperatures. We treated ourselves to a refreshing beer, watching Romans go about their daily business before we ventured out and about after dinner. We have plenty of time after dinner to 'tourist' as it's light until quite late.
On Saturday we awoke early and made our way to the Vatican for our 3 hr pre-booked tour which turned out to be exceptional. We have come to the conclusion that not skimping with tours and guides is worth the money. This one was again recommended on Trip Advisor. We found the Vatican, with the background information to be awe inspiring - another wow! moment but this was a biggie! There are a number of Vatican museums there which are themselves impressive as well as the Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica. Both of these live up to their reputations. The story of the chapel itself and Michelangelo's frescoing (the ceiling and the altar end wall are actually frescoes not just paintings and we learnt that this involved initial sketches, drawing on the surface including with charcoal, plastering and then painting during a window of 6-10 hrs of the plaster drying) was fascinating. We also found out that all marble statues were originally made with glass eyes, but except in a couple of rare exceptions the eyes have fallen out. St Peter's Basilica is absolutely huge - at least 2 American football fields long and you can fit the Statue of Liberty in the chapel dome! Wording on the dome base looks nothing special except when you are told it's actually 9 feet high!
We then exited onto St Peter's Square. We traversed part of the city on foot (along with many other tourists as it's starting to come into the high season) and took in the Castel Sant Angelo, Fountain di Trevi, Spanish Steps, Pantheon, Piazza Navona and Rome's central park, the Villa Borghese and the old Roman wall which surrounded the 'old' city and which is in quite good condition. We will do the other Rome icons (Colosseum etc) on our return in a week.
Summation of Italy to date? - Italians are animated, well mannered generally and for example, offer up seats on the metro to ladies and the elderly, are friendly, some can be scammers (there's always that element though isn't there), and as with other European women are generally well dressed, confident and more often than not have long dark hair.
So we're off to Athens for 1 night and then our Greek Island cruise where we are looking forward to putting our feet up for 5 days. After this holiday we feel like we'd be ideal contestants on the Amazing Race! Ciao until next time!