Last Day in Rome

So we thought our final day in Rome would be a liesurely one, with perhaps a stop in a café or in one of the piazzas for a few hours. WRONG. We still had lots to see and not a lot of time to see everything. Get ready for a ride!  Our first stop was the Pantheon...

Next - onto the Colosseum. We took the metro over and viewed one of the most impressive sites I’ve ever seen. Side note about the Colosseum..Tim’s uncle travels for work and one of his stops is in Dubai. Apparently to view the ski slope or the new hotel there, you have to pay a viewing fee of 50-60 Euros. One of the lines of the trip – ‘why would I pay 50 E to see your damn slope when I can pay 5 to see the Colosseum? ‘ Can’t argue with that, Vittorio. If you have never been, book your trip to Rome and see this. Our travel book gave this 3 stars – I completely agree.

After the Colosseeum, we stopped at BancoMat for some much needed cash. We then made our way down to the Basicllica di San Giovanni in Laterano. It is the cathedral of the diocese of Rome (not St. Peter’s, weird huh). Anyway – cool church and worth a stop. The one thing I can remember was the back door of this church was HUGE.

Next stop – Tim’s cousin’s bar near the Vatican. For those of you who don’t already know, a ‘bar’ is a place for food and coffee and some wine, but not a bar like in the US. So we stop by to say hi and visit, expecting to sample one of their pastries. We ended up having one of the best lunches of the trip! We started with some panini (I think it was tomato/mozz and another one with tom/proscuitto/another unknown meet) and these were ABSOLUTELY delicious. I could have had about 10 more. Next was what I’m dubbing chicken noodle soup pasta with sausage. I’m going to beg Matt to make this – we need to have it at home. All four of us finished our plates. We thought we were done – we were wrong. You can’t go to a bar that specializes in pastry and not have any pastry! Carlo brought us out a sampling of all of their pastries. SO GOOD. Except for Gelatto, we haven’t had much dessert on this trip (too full), so this was a great treat.

With full bellies, we moved back to the Vatican. We got in line to tour St. Peter’s (last time, when we did our catacomb tour, we only saw the undersaide…we still needed to tour the actual basillica). After St. Peter’s, we headed back to get some gelatto. Yummy stuff. We had to head back to get ready for dinner with our last family member of the trip – Tim’s cousin Claudio.

Side note – I wish I had family in Italy! Everyone we met is just so awesome!

So we met Tim’s cousin in the Campo De Fiori. She gave us a local’s tour of a few Piazzas and pointed out some neat things about the fountains etc. We then made our way over to the Jewish ghetto for dinner. Apparently it was a holiday for the Jewish religion on Friday night (help, Franklin), so only those that lived there were able to get into what looked like a fun celebration. We walked around outside the Jewish ghetto and then were able to get in right near our restaurant. Or at least we thought – took us a little while to find the place even with a local Roman! We then found our destination – Vecchio Romano. Delicous food and company. Pics to follow. Tim’s cousin promised to send me her recipe for Tiarmisu – I’m not forgetting that!!! Great way to say goodbye to Rome. We headed back to our hotel – Florence tommorow!!

Is anyone reading this (besides Kathy and Frank :) hehe...just curious !!