Lost Together: Rome, Italy - Sept 18 to 21, 2009

Rome. The name alone holds so much meaning and imagery. We had the highest expectations for Rome and our only disappointment was our dreadful hotel. I guess that's what you get when you travel as cheaply as possible. The city is absolutely amazing. We spent 4 whirl-wind days in Rome. We were busy all day every day, but at the end we felt like we saw a good chunk of the major sights. They say there is too much in Rome to see in a life time and that is definitely true.

Our first night we got settled into our hotel (or at least the replacement hotel, we were overbooked at the first one, so they moved us). We have a huge list of complaints with the hotel. We complained enough in the Naples update, so all we are going to say is NEVER stay at the "When in Rome Bed and Breakfast". If you want more details ask us or check for some of the reviews we left online.

That night we went out for some lasagna. We couldn't travel through Italy and only eat Pizza!

We started the first full day at the National Museum of Rome. We had a hard time finding the right place, the museum is actually split across 4 buildings around the city. 1 admission gets you into all 4. There were some great sculptures and artwork.

Ancient Roman Trompos!

An Amazing Tomb/Crypt:

Bust of Socrates:

After the museum we hopped on the train and went down to the Colosseum. This is another one of those landmarks that you can picture perfectly when you close your eyes. It's really an incredible site to see in person; one of the highlights of our trip. We took our time (and a ton of pictures) and slowly made our way through the entire structure. There were good explanations on display throughout the site that told the story of the Colosseum.

A sweet Rolls Royce parked outside:

After this did a long evening walk and covered a bunch of landmarks. To be honest there were so many and we waited too long to write this blog entry. We forgot the names of a lot of them and even the order in which we saw them... I guess travelling for so long has that effect...

We found a map of the Roman Empire at its biggest:

On our second day we started by visiting the Marie Maggarie Church. Afterwards we made our way down to the Palatino and Roman Forum. There were some pretty incredible ruins. We could go into a lot of detail here but there's enough of it online if you're interested.

That evening we went for another walk. Some of the highlights were the Pantheon, the Fountain of Trevi and Piazza Del Popolo.

On our last day we spent the majority of the time in Vatican City. This will be a separate post.

That night we went for another walk through Trastevere. We visited quite a few sights along our walk and finished at the Spanish Steps. This included returning to the Colosseum for some night shots. We were absolutely exhausted from the long days in Rome, so we hopped the train back to our hotel and got a good night sleep.