No, I’m not tired of that joke yet.
Well, we’re back from Rome, and it was an amazing place. You can’t chuck a meatball without hitting some massively grand 2000-year old monolith/ruin/building/pope. Fantastic. We spent a couple of days wandering about, having first taken a 2-hour bus trip around the city, to get our bearings. Best tips:
- DO go to the tourist information office and get a map
- DON’T be fooled by the map – its on a really large? scale – we were constantly walking past things as we thought they would be further away
- DO make a point of going into the Pantheon – an amazingly intact building which was constructed in something like 70AD
- DON’T get too carried away in the Vatican. By all means wander round if you have time; we found it a bit “fresco, fresco, fresco, bored, tapestry, tapestry, tapestry, bored, Sistine Chapel, BLIMEY!”. If you’re short on time, look in St Peters Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. Also, its worth getting one of the CD-audio guides. They’re not too expensive, are largely narrated by (we think) Emma Thompson, and have scads of info on pretty much everything.
- DON’T forget to buy cigarettes before you get to the airport. Very important. And yes, I do feel like an idiot
- DO think carefully when choosing a drinking den or eatery. Sitting in the square by the Pantheon listening to the fountain may seem like a fine location for beers, but at $/EUR:5.5 a glass (about £3.50) its a comparitively expensive way to do it.
Also of interest: of all the places we visited, the only places that charged a significant amount to get in were the Vatican and the Colosseum (and we didn’t bother with that – there’s not a lot inside to see, from what we could gather).