Day Fifty-One - Rome

This was our first full day of sight-seeing and we took it a bit slower as Henk has come down with a head cold. It’s not serious but he is not feeling too energetic. We left the apartment at ten o’clock and caught the Metro train two stops back into the city getting off at La Spagna. We are getting proficient at buying tickets at the automatic ticketing machines especially as they give the option of English! When we walked out of the station we were very quickly at the Spanish Steps. There were people everywhere. We walked to the top to get a good view down the steps and over some of the city. The Keats-Shelley Memorial is a pink stuccoed apartment alongside the Spanish Steps. Keats died at the age of twenty-five at the house in 1821.
From the steps we walked with crowds of people to the Trevi Fountain. It too had masses of people around it and we were determined to get to the front of it to throw our coins in. The guide book from the apartment says that the movie ‘Three Coins in a Fountain” taught us that we had to throw the coin in backwards over our shoulder to ensure a return visit to Rome. We duly did this taking photos of the opportunity.
Our next stop was at the Pantheon. It is under renovation and half of it was obscured with netting and scaffolding. By this time we were getting hungry and we had a pizza lunch at a nearby outdoors café in the Piazza overlooking the Pantheon before taking a closer look. Unfortunately, a mass was being conducted and we couldn’t go past the massive bronze doors but we are hoping to return later in the week to view the dome from the inside. Emperor Hadrian, apparently an amateur architect, designed the building in AD 118-125. He not only did walls as we saw last year in England!
By this time Henk was flagging and we returned by train to our apartment. We are in an area which has very little tourists and another guide book left in the apartment suggests the area we are in is very middle class. Certainly the people are well dressed.
We were going to have dinner in the apartment but the little grocery stores we have found in the area were all closed on Sunday afternoon. This forced us to go out to dinner and it was very pleasant. We found a very busy sidewalk café frequented with well-dressed Italians. It was a balmy evening and we enjoyed watching the passing parade. We indulged in wonderful miniature pastries. We will have to go back for more.
Henk has re-tuned the television for all the English programs and we can get BBC which is a good thing for a news freak like me!
We will need to get away early tomorrow as the Vatican tour Brian booked from Australia starts at nine o’clock. The sun is coming up much later and we tend to sleep in.
Photos: Spanish Steps; Trevi Fountain; The Pantheon.