Torino to Rome, Italy
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2005
1
12
16
Trip End
May 24, 2006
Rome,
Italy
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
on the mediterranean south of genoa
. I hear that the Amalfi coast south of Napoli is even more beautiful. Rome
85 degrees (30 celsius), sunny, and humid seems to be normal for Rome in the warm season, and so the trains drop you off at Rome Termini station and most tourists have no clue where they are in the city. All I knew was that there were a bunch of hostels somewhere to the north of the train station so I wandered around, sweating, with my rolling suitcase thing and my normal sized backpack. Most of the places were booked but eventually I found this crappy place to stay. A word of advice: if you don't have a hostel or hotel reservation in Rome just find the hotel information desk in the train station and someone will probably grab you and start writing down an address for you to go to. Things just tend to work out.
Well the first night I met these Australian guys to roam around town with and we went to the Spanish Steps (La Piazza di Spagna) which is this beautiful staircase that leads from this square up to some church. It's kind of in the center of Rome (if there were such a thing) and that's where all the young people go to just hang out, and maybe drink some coca cola or water. Italians aren't binge drinkers, which I think is very cool. If you are obviously not Italian and you go to the Spanish Steps you will be approached by some American college kids with flyers in their hands advertising Pub Crawls. These guys are cool and they drink a lot every night.
The Australian guys that I was with didn't want to spend 15 euro to go on a stupid pub crawl so they made friends with the flyer people and tried to figure out which bars they were going to. Well the plan kind of worked and we managed to find one of the bars. There was this kid at the bar who was sitting alone and some girls started talking to him. The second they found out that he had come to the bar on his own rather than in some big group they ran away. Somehow I thought that was sad... Americans insist on traveling in packs and think anyone who goes alone is weird. But then go out anywhere and you can meet all kinds of Kiwis and Australians or South Africans who don't have a care in the world when it comes to just going out to some far away place like Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico or Hawaii, completely alone. There's always people to meet. Thinking back on my four months in Europe this trip I can hardly think of any days where I was actually alone. Somehow there was just always someone around, so I was basically never alone and usually with really cool, fun, smart people. But still the first question out of an American's mouth is "You mean you went alone?"
So the next day I wandered around Rome, checked out the Sistine Chapel and the Coloseum. The Sistine Chapel was very cool since I was able to see all these frescoes by Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Botticelli that I had learned about sometime when I was in college. On one hand I think that art is really amazing, but then sometimes I wonder what all the hoopla is all about since sometime the art is just plain weird.
That evening I met my friend Marco Amici who is from Rome at the Spanish Steps and we got some dinner and gelato. I really like Rome... something I never expected to feel. It's just a cool place, with all the crazy streets and big old buildings and coffee bars and palm trees and stuff. I once read a description of what Rome was probably like 2000 years ago during the days of the Roman Empire and it really wasn't much different than it is now...
