Jetlag can be a good thing.
Or at least, it’s not that bad when you wake up at 5.30am and decide that seeing as the camera was out of battery yesterday and you had to use your mobile phone, this wouldn’t be a bad time, seeing as you are awake, to go for a wander and take some bigger better photos.
I left Alice reading her book and stopped in the Termini for an espresso and croissant (caramel croissants are 90 cents), then headed back down to the Spanish steps, detouring to the Fontana Di Trevi where I was amused to see some men with pool cleaners picking up all the coins out of the fountain. The Spanish steps were being cleaned with a pressure spray but you could still get up and down and take photos and whatnot.
While sitting at the fountain at the bottom one of the cleaners came over and I thought he was asking me to move so they could clean but he actually wanted to know what sort of camera I was using. D-due-centi, is what it is. His name was Rodolfo. Must be a good job for Rodolfo, cleaning Rome – I guess if you have to be a city cleaner somewhere…
Then I came back to the hotel to find breakfast (tea, orange juice, croissant, bread, butter, mini-toast, and jam) waiting on a tray on the bed and Alice busily reading her book. Jaye and Cam were bringing their hire car back to Rome that day and would be staying in a hotel about two blocks from ours. So we headed over to the Pantheon while waiting for them to say they had arrived. The Pantheon, like all the other monuments here which we’ve only seen on TV and in photos, is surprisingly large, both inside and out. You expect it to be big, but not like this. Inside, what with the hole in the roof and the vastly high doors, it is also suprisingly dark, and tricky from some of the more popular angles to get a properly lit photograph. After a good hour or so walking around the inside of the Pantheon and sitting in the pews and looking at Raphael’s grave and what-have-you, the awaited SMS came through and we headed back over toward the station.
There was some confusion over which entrance was the front entrance, and also we were starving, but we did find each other and then walked a total of 50m to the same pizzeria/bar/gelaterie as yesterday for a late late lunch. Despite more minor confusion over the bill, disaster was averted by the owner speaking being able to speak quite good english, and sorting everything out, and shouting at the guy who was going to bring my espresso after the meal but went on cigarette break and forgot, resulting in my request for coffee being treated as an additional order.
Jaye and Cam had to pick up laundry before 5pm so we split up and agreed to meet back at the station at quarter to 6 for further exploration and whatever came next. At our hotel we came across the dreaded question ‘Is this yours?’ – our ‘washing line’ had dripped all over the (tile) floor because the clothes weren’t properly rung out like we thought they were, so… wait for it… the cleaner had taken our washing line and attached it to the hotel’s washing line which rolls around on a neat little pulley system on the outside of the building. So now our washing was fresh, clean and smelled like Roman sunshine. Or something.
In the guide book it says it’s traditional to leave a small tip in your room for the cleaner; and why not?
Thankfully the guy at the desk said ‘If you want to wash, it’s OK, we hang it out here for you.’ (P.S the next morning that was exactly what they did, and they bought it in, and folded it, and put it on our bed).
After all that it actually got even better when we went perambulating with Jaye and Cam over to the Santa Maria Maggiore (they were on a whirlwind tour even shorter than ours when they came through Rome on the way to Tuscany and saw basically the Vatican and nothing else), then along the Via Quattre Fontane (so named for the intersection with the Via del Quirinale which features a fountain built into the walls on each of the four corners), and then past some buildings and fountains which looked pretty neat to us but didn’t even feature on the tourist map or in our guidebook, to the Monta Dei Trinita at the top of the Spanish steps.
On the way yesterday Alice spotted a gelaterie named ‘Alice’ and so of course if she did nothing else in Rome it was a matter of priority to go and eat gelato in the Alice gelaterie. Walking back up the hill, and up the Via Dei Due Macelli (the Due Macelli being, I think, the two Macelli’s who were paid to design the fountain at the bottom of the Spanish steps, which they placed exactly there to fix a local water-pressure problem) we came across the gelaterie in question.
Amazingly, coincidentally, perhaps even cosmically, there was stained glass design on a door in the back of the shop of somebody’s favourite Gustav Klimt painting – The Kiss. What that would be doing there, in the Alice gelaterie, I am not entirely sure. Obviously she isn’t the only one who likes that painting – but it did seem a little bit magical to find it there.
6 euros and four flavours of gelato later, and after agreeing with Jaye and Cam that a late late lunch and ice cream for dinner was a good way to live, we turned back down hill to the find the Fontane di Trevi (that Trevor Fountain) surrounded, perhaps even besieged, by people doing exactly what we were doing: checking out one of the World’s most beautiful fountains, lit up at night, after having had a nice ice cream. And for that reason we didn’t resent everyone else being there and crowding the plate and so on; in fact the crowd added even more spectacle. Not to mention the enterprising africans offering camera tripods for hire, or handing roses to the women and then raising their eyebrows at the men. Makes a buck or two, I suppose.
And…and, then it got better. Roughly southeast, past the Fontane Di Trevi, there is a street leading back up the hill to the Piazza Del Quirinale (the piazza near the building known as the Quirinale). The piazza was refreshingly deserted and so we got stuck into a nice spot of long-exposure night photography. The fountain in that Piazza is as a matter of course stunning. They all are. There isn’t a weak spot, or many buildings that look like they shouldn’t be there or aren’t up to scratch. And it gets more beautiful at night. And most of the main attractions are free, gratuito.
In short, Rome is brilliant. Roma e bella.
We walked and walked up that hill, slowly, and eventually came to the necessary right-turn to bring us back down to the Via Vicenza, which was where Jaye and Cam were staying, and where our walk, sadly, came to an end. But what a great evening we had. And we were back at the hotel by 10.30pm.
Magnifico.
Greg
