Our journey home - days 15 and 16, Rome

OK time to try to remember all that happened over a week ago in Rome!  As Richard reminded me this morning, I get to the end of our holidays and run out of blogging steam - well that and I have been reading all the posts on an online art course I am doing for the next 8 weeks or so with Jane Davenport from Byron Bay called 'Supplies Me'!  Can't wait to get home to Australia in a few days to start the actual art work!

Anyway back to Rome!  We arrived in Rome on the Saturday afternoon after driving down from Spoleto.  The drive was a little less crazy than some of our other journeys - well at least it was until we hit Rome!  We headed straight to our hotel and dropped our bags off and then went straight into the centre -yes the centre - of Rome to drop the car off!  We had to stop and buy some fuel on the way.  Boy, how we both wished we could speak Italian as the attendant was the rudest person ever!  After many times around the block with Portia we finally found the place we needed to drop the car off - well we thought we did until the guy behind the counter tried to direct us back the wrong way up a one way street to the car park!  I just kept playing dumb and eventually he said 'it's ok we will take it!'  Yay, success as I think Richard had well and truly had enough of driving in Italy!

We went for a bit of a walk and bought a public transport pass for our stay.  Good move as these cover trains, trams and buses.  We had some lunch and headed back to our hotel for a bit of a siesta.  Our hotel was fabulous!  Only two train stops from the Colosseum and full of art works!  Have a look at some of them:

These were in the carport at the entry to the hotel!

and these in the bar. 

There were more dotted all over the hotel, but I took no other photos unfortunately!  There was also some great graffiti art in the garage, but again no photos (the day I went to I had forgotten to put the memory card back in my camera!)

Anyway on Saturday night we just went out for a quick bite to eat and then went for a walk to get our bearings in Rome again.  We did find a fabulous gelati place - but more of that later!

On Sunday we decided to do a general walking tour of Rome.  Here's some of what we saw:

This building is not loved by the Romans.  They think it is too white and have named it either the 'typewriter', or if they are being really picky about it 'the false teeth'.  It has two eternal flames at the front as a memorial for service people.

Some of the details.  To give you an idea of scale the moustache on the man in these first photos is apparently three metres across and you could drive a double decker bus under the horse's belly!

This was the balcony Mussolini  made all his speeches to the Italian people during WWII.  It overlooks the square in front of the false teeth.

We walked past the Pantheon:

We walked from the Pantheon to Piazza Navona where we sat and shared a half a bottle of wine and watched the world go by:

There are some massive fountains in this square but we took no photos this time, we have them from our last trip to Rome and the light was not ideal.  We still however, checked out the work of the artists in the middle of the square and wandered from there towards the Tiber River.

In August there are markets every evening along the banks of the river, so we decided it might be worth checking out.  The markets looked very pretty from a distance:

.....but there was nothing there that made me say 'ooh I need to take you home!'


We did however manage to find a restaurant under one of the bridges and had some pasta and half a litre of red!  Very romantic!!

....and on the way home I found some graffiti quoting probably my favourite song of all time!

Got to love John Lennon.....so come dream with me!

There are still a couple of days of Rome and then we will be off to Bangkok where I am actually sitting while I write this! Ciao for now!