Sunday 16 February 2014

Winter Spirit day 7-8: Rome

Day 7: Florence to Rome
Luckily again I was feeling ok this morning, except for a cough, sore legs from walking up the tower and dancing all night, and no voice. We headed off to a little village on a hill called Orvieto, and saw a beautiful Duomo which had an intricate front and the sides had stripes. 
We had delicious gelato (tiramisu, cappuccino and bacio). After stopping at a service station for a lunch of pasta, we arrived at Rome to start a walking tour. The bus dropped us off at the station and we took the train into the city, to our first stop, the Spanish stairs. We walked to the Trevi fountain with its beautiful blue water, and learnt the story of the ghost in the top right window. Then it started absolutely pouring with rain, but I still managed to throw some coins in! 
When the rain eased off we continued on to the Pantheon, an impressive church with a hole in the roof that allowed the rain to come in! The group met again at a gelato shop with 150 flavours! I had my second gelato for the day, panacotta and Nutella. We continued around to see front of the Capitoline museums, the roman forums, and finished the tour outside the colosseum. Between the rain we has some lovely light to take some beautiful photos of the city.
We took the train back to the camping we were staying in for the 2 nights, and had a delicious feast which included pizza and pasta. Everyone was still very tired from partying for the last 2 nights so went to bed early.

Day 8: Roma.
Today we were going on a tour of the Vatican. We had to get there early to meet a guide and get in before the rest of the public. Our tour guide was very captivating and we saw some interesting things, the highlight for me was seeing the roof of the Sistine Chapel, which was incredible. We ended the tour a St Peters Basillica, which has the most impressive inside of all the churches I've been to, all of the 'paintings' are actually mosaics. After walking around the Basillica, we stopped at a cafe outside Vatican City for a quick lunch, and I got a cappuccino and penette alla vodka, delicious!
We took the train to the colosseum after stopping by some stalls to pick up some jewellery which the boys weren't too happy with. When we got to the colosseum we stood on a hill to take some pictures before we joined the line. We skipped the line to get a guided tour, to find the tour just left as we were buying tickets, so we got an audio guide instead, which was probably for the best for our Mexican friend, he got a guide in Spanish. It was very impressive but I had started feeling quite sick by this time, thanks to the infamous topdeck cough that founds it's way though our group much earlier than normal.
We walked down to the hand of truth, a statue that is supposed to cut off the hand of liars when they put their hand in the mouth. There was a big line so we didn't put our hand in it. From there we walked back to the Trevi fountain again to see it without all the rain. We passed many souvenir shops and stopped at most of them. We went back to the camp site then, stopping at the supermarket across the road for some arancino balls, and cheese and crackers for dinner. I went to bed early so I could sleep away my cold and get my voice back. Everyone else had a toga party because we were losing 13 of our group in the morning.

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