When in Rome...

Benjamin and I returned safely from our two week vacation in Italy. We had such a great time, it was hard to leave and come back to the real world. The flight to Rome wasn't too bad, we flew from San Jose to Chicago (~4.5 hrs) and then Chicago to Rome (~9 hrs). On our outbound itinerary, we had access to the AA Admirals club which was pretty nice - free drinks, food and internet access. Our plan was to stay awake on the Chicago leg and then sleep on the way to Rome to avoid jet lag. Benjamin had to keep waking me up; once the plane takes off, my eyes close - especially at 6:30am! A couple of delicious airplane meals and a few uninteresting movies later, we arrived in Rome! We took a train from Leonardo da Vinci airport to Termini (the main public transportation station). From there, we could have hopped into a cab to our hotel but we wanted to be adventurous so we decided to get on the Metro; it looked pretty easy - there are only two lines (A and B). Not so. In theory, it looked easy but figuring out where to actually catch the metro going the right way was a different story. Afer a couple runarounds, we made it to the hotel! Rome is amazing. I didn't think I would like it as much as I did, but it turned out to be my favorite out of all the cities we visited. Pretty phenomenal to see how a city built itself around so much history. You'd be walking around and in the midst of high end clothing shops and trendy restaurants, there would be a massive building built in the days of Caeser. We hit up all the big sites - Vatican, St. Peter's, Borghese, Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain. Most of these areas were filled with tourists even though it wasn't "busy season". Speaking of which, if you're thinking about going to Italy, I highly recommend early May. The weather was perfect (70s and sunny), we only had one evening of rain the whole time we were there. While it was nice to see the historic and religious venues even though neither of us are religious, we really enjoyed the different piazzas and not-so-touristy areas like Trastevere. We frequented Piazza Navona, specifically Tre Scalini for their tartufo. A tartufo is a ball of chocolate gelato rolled in dark chocolate chunks, topped with whipped cream and a cherry. It was out of this world. We probably ate a total of at least five during our stay in Rome. Our favorite restaurant was Cul-de-Sac near Campo di Fiore. We went there twice for their tapas style dishes and delicious extra-crusty-on-the-outside-but-soft-on-the-inside bread. Of all the places we traveled in Italy, Rome had the best bread by far. And the wine, oh the wine...so good and so inexpensive. It was cheaper than Coke so we had a liter of vino della casa rosso with almost every dinner. We also enjoyed the Italian caffe, which everyone said was to die for..we agree. Due caffe espressos, porfavore. I'm pretty sure Benjamin went into caffeine-addict remission on this trip.

More pics of Rome