My short visit to Rome

Some time ago I was thinking how I could spend my time during vacation. My father made some suggestions for travel destinations, which included Rome, which he had visited years ago. Because I’m interested in the period of Classical Antiquity, and because it would give me the opportunity to visit the places in Rome I had heard about during my study, I accepted his offer. For this post, I created two maps with Google Maps for the first and second day of my visit of Rome.

Last Friday on the 27th June, I departed to visit Rome for two days together with my father. At Eindhoven Airport we boarded a flight of Ryanair to Rome Ciampiano Airport.

After we landed, we boarded a bus to travel to the nearest station of the Rome Metro, Anagnina. A bus ticket cost € 1,20 and the metro ticket which is valid for a certain amount of minutes (75 minutes AFAIK, there is no limit on the distance travelled) cost € 1,00. This is incredibly cheap. Unfortunately the metro system only consists of two lines, which is a pity. Most of the time we walked through Rome, we didn’t really bother to figure out how the bus worked. We exited at the station Repubblica.

From there on we went to our hotel, the Eurostars International Palace. We were really satisfied with the hotel. It probably was a bit expensive with four stars, but the costs were acceptable because our visit was short. We boarded the aircraft in The Netherlands at approximately 14:30 and we entered the hotel at approximately 18:00. Because it was already late we didn’t have much possibilities to visit attractions because most are closing soon after 18:00. We walked around the surroundings of the Roman Forum a bit, then we picked a restaurant for dinner. After that we visited the Trevi Fountain and then we went to sleep at our hotel.

On the first day we visited these attractions:

1. Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
2. Ara Pacis
3. St. Peter’s Basilica
4. Vatican Museums
5. Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II
6. Church of the Gesu
7. Sant’Ignazio
8. Pantheon
9. Piazza Navona
10. Column of Marcus Aurelius
11. Campo de’ Fiori

To get to the Ara Pacis we took the metro from Termini to Spagna. We passed the Mausoleum of Augustus, which is directly east of the Ara Pacis, but unfortunately it was closed for tourists. We chose to skip the St. Peter’s Basilica because the row was long, and we would visit it monday morning when there was no row at all. We never had to wait for longer than five minutes during our entire visit of Rome. During the morning I started to feel a bit sick, so we returned to the hotel after visiting the Vatican Museums. After lying on my back for a few minutes I felt fine again and we started moving. We were pleasantly surprised that the visit to the Vatican Museums also included the Sixtine Chapel. During this day I experienced that I can’t tolerate a temperature close to 35 °C as well as other people. I was sweating immensely, and needed a lot of water to remain standing.

We visited the following on the second day:

1. National Museum of Rome
2. Trajan’s Forum
3. Capitoline Museums
4. Roman Forum
5. Colosseum
6. Basilica of St. John Lateran
7. Baths of Caracalla

We had already seen Trajan’s Forum from the outside on the day we arrived, but later we realized that it is accessible through a museum which has an entrance situated on the northern side. All three museums demanded most of our time on the second day, there was so much to see. The Roman forum has it’s entrance on the eastern side, which is important to remember because it’s a long walk if you walk around it to search the entrance. The Roman Forum and the Palatine hill were a bit of a disappointment for me, it consisted mostly of ruins and it wasn’t very interesting. The ticket for the Roman Forum included access to the Palatine hill and the Colosseum. This turned out to be an advantage, because we could later bypass the long row of people waiting to buy tickets at the Colosseum. The Colosseum didn’t interest me very much either. After all, it’s a simple structure made out of bricks, it’s nice to have seen it but nothing more. After the Colosseum we walked a long distance to the basilica of St. John Lateran. It was worth it, because this is the most impressive basilica I have seen after St. Peter’s basilica. One more attraction was on the schedule to be visited, the baths of Caracalla. Again this was a long walk, and when we arrived at 18:50 we were told that the baths of Caracalla closed at 18:30. That sucked because I really wanted to see it, the travel guide we read wasn’t specific because it mentions that the baths close one hour before sunset. The plan was to find a restaurant in Trastevere because the travel guide mentioned that some of the best restaurants were to be found there. The distance to Trastevere was too long for us, we were already spent, so we decided to take the metro from Circo Massimo to Termini. Finally we had dinner in a restaurant close to our hotel. The restaurant and the ice cream served there was good, but the pizza was terrible. The pizza bottom was so thin and hard that it broke as soon as I tried to spear it on my fork. And while public transport is very cheap in Rome, the restaurants are rather expensive.

One thing I regret is that I didn’t plan what attractions we would visit in advance. During the morning of the day of our departure, I read the travel guides and Wikipedia for a few hours to determine what I wanted to visit, but that was not enough. I composed a definite schedule of attractions to visit during the evening in Rome, but I missed a few things which I then unnecessarily had to visit a day later.

I brought my new Olympus E-410 DSLR camera along. I still need to write a post which covers this camera, but so far I’m quite pleased with the results, compared to a point-and-shoot camera. The photos I have taken during my visit of Rome will be uploaded soon.

To conclude this post, I’m quite satisfied with my visit to Rome. If I had the choice to do it again, I wouldn’t go during June, July or August. The climate of Rome features temperatures during these months which are too high for my liking. It was great to see the things you normally see in books or on Wikipedia in reality. I probably enjoyed visiting the museums the most.