“I found Rome brick, I left it marble.” - Caesar

Two weekends ago we flew to the beautiful Italian capital - Rome. I think I have to agree with Olya and say that from all the places we've seen in Europe so far, Italy is by far my absolute favourite. It must be the overall vibe, where everyone seems relaxed and almost dazed as they move through their day strolling on the pretty piazzas and sipping on their awesome coffees.

We had three days and ended up seeing quite a bit. My personal favourites being the Colisseum and the Sistine Chapel (the line to which took just under an hour in drizzly weather). Overall the city leaves an impression of a completely out-of-this-world kind of place, where one stumbles upon very old sites and places everywhere. Unlike Greg I don't mind the grafitti all that much, somehow it doesn't bother me and therefore the general impression was very positive. The only two lowlights were the fact that I got sick the night beforeflying out and continued to be sick for the whole time, AND our hotel, which was clean, but the "little asian" women running it didn't have a good grasp of English or Italian for that matter (as we observed a bunch of Italiansstruggling to check-in) and the whole place was drafty. BUT it was Italy and in the end of the day I don't care!

Here is a small selection of our best photos . . .


We also ventured out to see the Aquaducts but instead of catching a tour bus we decided that we can do it ourselves. Thus armed with a map which was not to scale (and omitted some very important landscape markers) and which did not have any decent information about public transport, we spent about 2 hours on five different buses trying to get there... and in the end this is where we ended up (the ruins on the horizon are indeed the Aquaducts - sadly, they were somewhat unaccessible).

And of course no post would be complete without a tiny bit of humour - this stylish "golden" lady was parading around the Piazza Spagna, and Jack couldn't resist a photo.