Gelato a Day

"Ciao, bella!"  This is how our gelato guy greated us every day when we came in for our fix.  He would follow it up by blowing us a kiss and then trying to convince me to go with the cup instead of the cone because he could put more in there for me.  Everyone should have gelato this way.  I wanted to ask him to adopt me.

This is a roundabout way of saying that Rome was awesome.

Some notes:

 - There are these drinking fountains all over town.  The water flows out of the bottom of the spigot but there is a hole at the top that if you plug the bottom with your finger the water shoots out.  I thought they were the cleverest thing.  (Random observation:  Is that sunlight or am I going bald in this picture?)

- We walked and walked and walked and then we walked some more. And then we napped.  And then we walked.  We had metro cards but sometimes it was just easier to walk to the next place instead of walking back to the metro stop.  Cynde had a pedometer and on two seperate days we walked 9+ miles.

  

- This more than justified my one-a-day gelato resolution (kept, by the way.)  And my nightly pasta and cheese consumption.  We called it carbo-loading.

- My favorite gelato combo:  pistachio and chocolate/hazenut (It's called The Italian Kiss.  Our other gelato guy winked at me when he said it.)

- I'm sorry to keep going on about the food but seriously, I had some of the best food I've ever eaten in my entire life.  Fresh gnocchi in gorgenzola sauce?  I'll take 5 plates please. 

 - We stayed in a really cute little apartment across the piazza from the Spanish Steps.  It's like the Beverly Hills of Rome.  We completely lucked into it.  We would go into other parts of the city where we had also looked for places and realized that we would have been murdered in our beds there.

- How sweet that they monogrammed the toilet paper for me.

- John Keats died of consumption in a pensione right next to the Spanish Steps.  We went to the museum there.  It was raining.  I sighed a lot and fought off the urge to write poetry.

- If you want to look Italian you wear the following:  dress shorts/short dress/long sweater/tunic with leggings/tights with boots (preferably over the knees) and a puffy coat even when it's 70 degrees outside.  All in black.  This is what 90% of the women were wearing.

- If you want to look like a tourist you wear the following:

- We climbed to the top of the St. Peter's.  320 steps after the elevator takes you high above the center of the cathedral.  It drops you off on a walkway inside the dome so you can look down.  There was a funeral going on in Latin.  There were lots of guys in robes and funny hats.  After you climb up a series of treacherous stairs in both spiral and switch-back form.  The view was worth it.

- We were almost run over by a yellow Ferrari being chased by the police.  How very Italiano!

- Also very Italiano:  Strike!  Strike!  Strike!  The firefighters of the city put on a protest march that we viewed from the top of the capitol building.  There was flag waving and whistle blowing and lots of singing and chanting.  How do you say si se puede in Italian?

- The next time you see me ask to see my postcard of the crypt decorated entirely in the bones of the friars who ran it.  It will creep you out for days.

-  I cried when I saw the Pieta.

- If I had not, just 4 days earlier, been in a bathroom in the middle of the Sahara that was literally a cement slab with a plastic grocery bag to pee in (which I did not.  I have standards...and a bladder of steel), I would have said the bathroom at the Coliseum was the nastiest one on earth.  But the graffiti was sure fun to read.

- The Mouth of Truth did not bite off my hand.  But I was nervous.

- We went to mass at the Santa Maria Maggiore.  It was in Italian and there were incense and I think several members of the mafia.  Which means it was everything I had hoped for and more.

- You should go to Rome with your best friend.  It's fun.  She will not judge you when the wind at the top of St. Peter's gives you Farrah Fawcet bangs.