Scusi, please. I have a one-track mind...

So, I've been having the same dream over several nights lately - in the dream, I've rented a villa in Tuscany for my 50th birthday, and several friends join me for a vacation there.  Clearly, I need to start saving my pennies, since my subconscious is telling me to get the heck out of dodge and into bella Italia in 2014!  Good thing I'm still on a mailing list for Italian villa rentals!  Of course, on the reality scale, I also have a gentleman friend in the dream, so perhaps I should be taking the dreaming/planning with a grain of salt...

Anyway, when my friends and I got back from our Italian adventure in 2007, I made my first forays into online posting - I did some trip reports for Trip Advisor.  Since I had used their message forum quite a bit for ideas and advice, I figured it only fair to post what worked (and what didn't) for me.  Just for fun, and to get more Italian hopefulness out into the universe, I'm going to reprint below my trip report for our first day (and a half) in Rome.  Hope I didn't screw anything up!  Most of the pictures are mine, but a few of them were taken by a beloved gal pal with a much better camera and way more genius in the photography area.  Let me know if you want to see the reports from our other day in Rome, not to mention our travels to Naples, Sorrento, Capri, Pompeii or Positano.  To loosely quote a Golden Girl, picture it: Rome, over Thanksgiving, 2007...

TRIP REPORT - ROME

After winning a game show (definitely a story for another day) I recently went with three friends on a 10-day holiday to Rome, Naples and Sorrento.  It was a fabulous trip and I apologize in advance if these reports are too long-winded.

We decided to travel in the off-season, so our plane departed JFK on the night before Thanksgiving.  The flights were easy peasy, with moderately tasty food on all planes.  Our layover at Heathrow was long-ish, but not too bad.  I didn't get a lot of sleep, since I was so excited!  Luckily, the first flight was playing The Apartment as their movie!  You can't miss with Billy Wilder!  FYI, my only other trip to Europe was in 2000, when I went to Paris, Amsterdam and Bruges with a guy who was not a good travel partner.  I don't know, I guess you don't find that kind of thing out until you actually travel with someone.  Thankfully, my Italian Adventure Pals and I meshed well throughout the entire trip, which made an already dream-like trip even more dreamy!  :)

When we arrived in Rome, it was early evening and we were tired.  We exchanged money at the exchange booth near the baggage claim.  We got a very bad rate there, so we’ll never do that again.  One of our bags was lost en route, so we spent a lot of time dealing with that.  I have to say, though, the baggage attendants were very pro-active and helpful.  And handsome.  Il mio dio, the men in Italy were attractive.  And we haven't left the airport yet.  Whew.  Moving on.  We were staying at the apartment affiliated with the Hotel Italia and I had also signed up for a car pick-up through them, since there were four of us.  Two of our party went ahead through customs to meet the driver while the other two of us dealt with the baggage problem, since we discovered the international Blackberry we brought didn’t work and no one could call us to find out where we were!  But all turned out well—the driver was waiting for us when we all finally straggled through.

The driver spent most of the ride on his cell phone, which was a little disappointing, but since it was dark, we couldn’t really see anything anyway.  The minivan he drove was very comfortable and he drove quickly and confidently.  Thankfully, we didn’t start off with an Italian thrill ride in the car!

In no time we arrived at our apartment on Via della Cava Aurelia, near the Vatican.  We were met by Andrea, the caretaker of the apartment.  He was very kind and spent quite a good deal of time with us, giving us a map and showing us the layout of the city.  It was a nice way to be introduced to Rome.  He recommended the restaurant down the street from the apartment, so off we went. 

The neighborhood we stayed in was very quiet and very secluded, but was also very safe because it was in a gated community alongside a Russian Embassy.  So that was a nice bonus for us.  The restaurant, Ristorante Barone, was great.  It seemed to be all locals, mainly there to use the free wi-fi.  Our waiter was very patient with our fledging Italian and suggested several local specialties for dinner.  The food was AMAZING!  We knew it would be, but hello, that doesn't mean you can't be gobsmacked by good food all the same.  We purchased a bottle of the house red to take back to the apartment with us and called it a night.  No better way to start a trip that will include much wine drinking with a little...wine drinking.  Oh, and the first kerfuffle with using a pay telephone to try to call my mother occurred before dinner.  It became quite a joke how I couldn't make an Italian phone work.  :( 

Our first morning in Rome—we went to a café near the apartment and had our first cappuccinos and pastries of the trip.  They definitely weren’t the last!  And may I just say how thrilling it was to make a right turn off our street and get a view of St. Peter’s!  We loved that view!   I had booked an official Vatican guided tour about a month before we left.  I’m glad we did, because the line to get in the museum was quite long.  Our tour was for 10:30am, so we arrived at the tour entrance at around 10:15 (it took us much longer to get all the way around to the entrance than we thought).  One of our first fun Italian interactions:  it was confusing as to which line was for people with confirmed Vatican tours and which was the regular main entrance.  So, I asked a gent in a guard’s uniform.  He very gravely looked at me and said in an extremely bass voice, “Please.  Don’t talk to me.  Talk to him.”  All with a great Italian accent.  We had much fun the rest of the trip repeating THAT phrase!  Anyway, we finally figured it out and got in. 

The tour itself was wonderful and our tour guide, Christiano, was a delight.  The museum was lovely and Christiano was a charming guide.  At the beginning of the tour, we're heading up an escalator and Christiano started his explanation of the art in the Sistine Chapel to us, since he wouldn't be joining us for that part of the tour.  There is a small replica of Michelangelo's ceiling at the top of the escalator, and Christiano took quite a bit of time explaining it all to us.  Another of our favorite phrases that got repeated throughout our trip?  "We go to hell now, ciao, ciao."  And that is how we had the Last Judgement section of the artwork explained to us.  :)    Christiano also gave us permission to use the term Mamma Mia whenever we entered an especially beautiful room in the museum.  He was a charmer.  After viewing all of the gorgeous art in the museum, it was awe-inspiring to finally see the Sistine Chapel in person.  Before heading into the Sistine Chapel, Christiano also gave us some advice for sites we should see before we left Rome, and he also made us promise to drink some white wine when we got to Campania.  We, of course, took all of his suggestions, since we were all half in love with him by the end of our tour.  Maybe even more than half...

Of course, it was then monumentally thrilling to be in St. Peter's Basilica.  The Pieta took my breath away (of course, none of MY photos turned out well here).  We took our time, looking at nearly everything, and tried to remember everything that Christiano had taught us while we looked around.  It was an amazing morning.  

After buying some souvenirs in the basilica gift shop (Christmas presents purchased, yay!), and sending some mail from the Vatican Post Office, we headed out to find some lunch.  We settled on a pizza rustica shop in the Borgo and I had a delicious slice of pizza with prosciutto.  I couldn’t get enough proscuitto on this trip.  It was just so delicious, I believe I had it every day.  The rest of the day was spent just wandering through Rome and heading towards monuments when we felt like it.  We wandered through Piazza Navona, toured the Pantheon, did some window shopping, threw coins into Trevi Fountain and marveled from the top and bottom of the Spanish Steps.  It was lovely not having any real itinerary so that we could look at whatever caught our fancy.  And lots of things caught our fancy!  There was so much to look at, we didn’t know where to start!

By the end of our wanderings, we were starting to feel tired, so we caught the metro near the Spanish Steps and got off at the St. Peter’s Square stop.  We loved joking that we had to walk through St. Peter’s to get to the subway!  But it was such a lovely walk, day or night, that we did it every time we rode the subway, even though we probably could’ve used a different stop. 

We had dinner in our neighborhood again, at the Osteria dei Pontefici.  There was a group of Spanish soccer fans there causing a ruckus, which was fun, and our food was again delicious.  My gnocchi was so light, it was out of this world.  No photos of the gnocchi, unfortunately.  Unsurprisingly, we slept well after so much history, walking and good food!!  J