Day 4 - Thursday 8 April - Rome

Woke up at 7am and went for a walk/jog with the camera and took lots of photos of the St Peters Basilica and other shots of significant looking buildings from the Tiber river - wanted to see if the morning sun made a difference to the light…. got a couple of good shots. Needed to come back to the apartment and look up to see what I had taken photos of!!

Had some trouble working out the hot water, so we sat around for a while reading and updating this journal while waiting for it to get hot. Computer not charging properly, so relying on it staying on through the adaptor plug to be able to use it…… bit disappointing considering I bought it for the trip! need to find an internet café to update the get jealous blog and send a facebook hello to the girls….

After breakfast went walking - went to the Castel St Angelo - Hadrian’s Mausoleum - took lots of photos across Rome - fascinating to think that this was a burial place that is so ancient and we were walking on the same stones as those so many and so long ago…..

 Headed towards Augustus’ Mausoleum (is there a theme about death here?) and when we got to it, there was a big fence around it - it is in a sad state of disrepair.


Continued walking in no particular direction and found ourselves on the Via Del Corso - almost like the Rodeo Drive of Rome - so any designer shops. Had lunch in a little café - shared a pizza and had a few glasses of prosecco. We estimated that we must be fairly near the Spanish Steps, so went to find them - very easy to ‘stumble’ across….. Not so the Trevi Fountain, which we thought we headed towards, but instead found the column of Marcus Aurelius just sitting there in the middle of the Piazza Colonna….

Decided we had missed the Trevi Fountain so decided to try to head for home - not so easy really - we thought we were further south than we were, but eventually we came upon the Tiber and could figure out where we were - realised later we had done a big circle around the Spanish steps back to the Ponte (bridge) Umberto 1 - at least we new where we were.

 After a little snooze, went to Piazza Navona to meet our tour - I thought we were doing wine bars near the Piazza Navona, but it turned out we were doing an orientation to this end of Rome - our guide Andrew was lovely - an American living in Rome - he is an architect and gave us an insight into the architecture of Rome and how each successive generation basically builds on what was there before (or builds around it!) which is why nothing much seems to connect with anything else and explains why we went in circles in the day….. Had a great tour - it’s nice to get some background to the things we were looking at - even found the entrance to the original stadium tucked away behind the top end of the Piazza Navona… went through Campo d Fiori and across to Trestevere which was just starting to come alive - lots of wine bars and young people. Campo de Fiori is a market by day and then becomes a night spot at night - fascinating. We will start there tomorrow……. Had dinner close to home - lovely spinach pancake for me and ravioli for Graham - became very cold and had to head home….