Buongiorno from Roma!
Whoops... Apparently we were more jetlagged than we thought, because we never actually published our Rome blog entry! Ah well, holidays... So, to be clear, this all happened immediately AFTER we landed in Rome, and BEFORE we went to Tuscany. You'd think that since we're on holiday, we could get these little details right wouldn't you! Oh well.
So it was not long after 6am on a Sunday when two jet lagged tourists started out on a run through thee streets of Rome to clear the cobwebs (believe it or not this was Al's idea, not Michelle's). We decided to run through a park we'd seen on the map, running beside what looked like a river bed. Stopping to stretch we happened to stop in front of some tourist information boards and discovered the riverbed was in fact Circus Maximus. (This sort of experience woul repeat itself over the next few days; every time we turned a corner we'd stumble across some ancient monument older than Australia). Ha, so feeling like chariot racing athletes we continued on our way, racing off out past the walls of the city (well jogging slowly anyway).
Things started well on our 'Airbnb' sponsored trip through Europe, as the area we stayed in also happens to be home to a farmers market so Michelle was grinning like a cheshire cat from day one. Bruno* the cheese monger, owner of 8 sheep (or possibly 80/800/8000 - it wasn't clear from the hand signals) had quite the sales pitch at 7:30 in the morning, and it wasn't long before a few shards of cheese to taste turned into alarmingly large blocks of cheese being stuffed into our bag. We were certain we would be dragging the half-wheel of (delicious) blue cheese around Europe for the next eight weeks, but as it turns out we are quite capable of eating an astonishing amount of cheese in a short period of time.
Having been to Rome before we weren't too concerned about hitting the big sights. It's quite relaxing not having to hit every sight in 48 hours but to just wander, and getting lost in the back streets of Rome is remarkably easy. But somehow with Rome you can't help but stumble across something important. All roads seemed to lead us back to the Collosseum, for example.
On our last morning we ran along the Tiber river bank to the Vatican and St. Paul's; stunning in the morning light. Maarvelous. Tourists were lining up already at 7:30 in the morning.
Fun fact: people from Rome call themselves Romans. Not sure why this is amusing but it is. Something about always thinking of Romans as wandering around in togas and drinking from giant goblets. Haven't seen to many togas just yet.
*names may have been changed, or may not as we never did ask his name.
Michelle managed to persuade Al into going along to an exhibition about food under the guise of going to a modern art gallery (MAXXI) which featured, among other things, one of the first posters for Tupperware from the fifties. Al did manage to find a couple of interesting things including a section on the global seed bank buried in the polar ice in Scandinavia in a structure crying out to have a 007 movie written about it.
Poster from the 1940's at the Food exhibition at MAXXI. Seems the message just hasn't gotten through even though we've been telling people for at least 50 years.
Ciao ciao! Next stop Toscana...