Day 27 – May 12 Thursday

Up at 6.30am & a bit of blog time before another hotel breakfast, a day planning session & out the door by 9.15pm on the well trodden Corso Vittorio Emanuele II.  We walked to the Area Sacra as it had a sign up next to it saying it was a free Wi-Fi internet area.  Well, I spent about an hour going through all of the available unsecured Wi-Fi services, I found & couldn’t get any free Wi-Fi (Why aren’t I as smart as James, he would have solved it in no time).  We kept on walking to the Musei Capitolini, just behind the impressive Monumento Vittorio Emanuele.  Today we went into the museum on top of the Capital Hill, it was built on the foundations of ancient Roman ruins & these are incorporated into the museum exhibits on the ground floor, impressive!   There is a great outlook over a massive excavation site, with a great arch & columns standing everywhere.  The rest of the museum consists of statues, burial inscriptions, sarcophagus & paintings.  A complete floor is dedicated to statues & busts with another floor devoted to great painters from the 1500s-1700s.  Outside in the courtyard is the remains of a massive marble statue of Hadrian, feet, hands & head are all huge, the statue must have been very impressive when assembled.  After a few hours in the museum we sat outside in the shade on the steps, rested & had our orange & apple.

We stopped in a small cafe & had a very late lunch.  In Rome when crossing the road it’s like playing Russian Roulette – you walk across praying (you cross & pray) that the drivers will stop for you (otherwise you’d never get across).  We are convinced that the Italian drivers must be pretty good drivers the way they get through this organised (or not) chaos. There are so many mainly small cars & scooters (many Vespas) on the road & they park everywhere & so close together that they are just about touching.  There are not too many big motorbikes in Rome, the vast majority are scooters.  It seems that the stop signs, pedestrian crossings & lane markings are advisory only.

Then off to Basilica San Pietro, with thousands of visitors streaming out of it.  We went inside an exhibition of the last pope who was sainted last week (glad we weren’t here then) & a very good display was set out of his life from childhood until death.  We exited on the portico outside the church, it is huge, a grand scale.  A few pictures then back off across the Piazza San Pietro & wending our way back to the hotel through the maze of streets.

At 5pm we met up with our new tour group for our upcoming “Best of Italy” & had a few quite glasses of water & orange juice before our tour briefing & handing out of bits & pieces. A full bus, 36 Americans & 4 Australians & Giani an Italian tour leader.  We had a fantastic time up until now, let’s hope the next 10 days will be as good.   Finished by 6pm & blog time.

We had a meal at a side walk Pizzeria & an Italian beer.  What I can’t stomach is that people light up a cigarette while we are eating & this happens in good restaurants too – spoils the meal for us.  We are amazed how many little clothing/shoes shops, etc. & that every side street has restaurants/cafes/pizzerias.  How do they all exist?