Before I start telling you about all of our adventures in Rome, I think it’s important for you to know that we were here for four days, and on each day, Kelsey cried at least once. Each time they were tears of joy, except for the last day when they were tears of sadness because I was “making her leave” (her words, not mine). The fact that we were even here was a dream come true for her, and the fact that she got to live out her Lizzie McGuire fantasy tossing a coin into the Trevi fountain on multiple occasions only made it better. The original intention of this trip to Europe was not to come to Italy, but rather drive around Catalonia. I am so, so, so glad we did not do that because Italy, Rome in particular, was the absolute highlight of our trip.
Our time in Italy started with a quick jaunt from Barcelona down the Mediterranean on Spanish low-cost carrier Vueling ($45 per ticket…not bad!). Rome’s airport is well-connected by train to the city center. We took a train to Trastevere station and then a streetcar up to near where we were staying. I lost a few Euros in a battle with a ticket vending machine outside Trastevere station, but we got our revenge when the ticket validation machines on the tram were broken so we got to ride for free. If you’re arriving into Trastevere station, it’s not as easy to get a metro ticket as you may think. There was only one ticket machine (which ate my coins) and one newsstand selling tickets between the train station and tram station, so keep that in mind. On the train we were treated to a very nice sunset out the window as we started our **cue Dean Martin track** evening in Roma.
We found our way to the Airbnb easily and were in awe at how cute it was inside, with an arched brick ceiling in the entryway and rustic wood in our studio. After our bad hotel experience in Barcelona, it was a treat to have some charm back in our lives. Now that we were settled, we queued up our new best friend Rick Steves for a walking tour of Rome, seeing major sights like the Pantheon, Piazza Narvona, Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps under the romance of nighttime in Roooommmaaa. We played the tour on Kelsey’s phone connected to AirPods, of which Kelsey and I each took one. It worked perfectly—I highly recommend the “wireless headphones and downloaded audioguide” approach. My key takeaways from the tour: the Pantheon is truly an architectural and historical treasure even just from the outside, it was only a little bit embarrassing to recreate the Lizzie McGuire coin toss scene at the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps are annoyingly asymmetric.
Now with a feel for the major sights in Rome’s center, we hurried to Hosteria Farnese where we had a dinner reservation. This was a place Kelsey found on Google that seemed to have great reviews, most of which were in Italian. We got spaghetti carbonara, pappardelle Bolognese, veal saltimbacca, and a braised Roman artichoke, and it was all very, very good, with the pastas leading the way. The carbonara was a lot more yellow than anything I have seen in the States (meaning more egg yolk), and the pasta made me realize that my current conception of al dente would seem vastly overcooked to an Italian.
There are two more things worth highlighting about this meal, one good and one bad. I’ll start with the bad. We were sitting next to a table of the most annoying British people I have ever encountered. One aristocratic English twenty-something berated his half-English, half-Irish friend for at least 20 minutes about how it was impossible to identify as both Irish and English so he needed to pick one. They just kept going on and on about a concept that is so crystal clear to me (and I hope all other Americans)—that one can have multiple heritages and honor each of them in whatever way one feels like. They also had ordered too much food and pondered if they should “act like Americans and ask for a doggy box!” as if the concept of taking home extra food you had already paid for was so ridiculous. Finally they started watching videos at full volume on their phones in this 20-seat family restaurant, which is when Kelsey turned around and exchanged some words with them. Quite annoying, but I was very proud of my wife for telling them off.
Now for the good highlight: the panna cotta. We ordered a panna cotta with cherries for dessert and oh my goodness, it blew my mind. It was so jiggly yet so creamy and rich, and it was served with an amarena cherry sauce which was incredible. We ordered one to share, wolfed it down, then ordered another one. The waiter hooked us up the second time with a triple serving of the cherry sauce, bless his soul.
The next morning was a big one with a trip to the Colosseum. We had pre-booked our tickets for an 8:30am entry, the first of the day. On our walk from the Campo de Fiori area where we were staying to the Colosseum, we unexpectedly happened upon the grand Piazza Venezia, which is an enormous thing to just kind of stumble upon. We were awestruck once again at the incredible variety of sights sprinkled all across the city. At the Colosseum, we were one of the first people to enter and we very quickly scrambled up the stairs for a high-level view of the building. With so few people there, it was a really special experience to see everything without throngs of people dotting every surface. While there, we dialed up our pal Rick and let him take us on a tour, which again, I highly recommend. Kelsey was shocked by the violence involved in the spectacles there and I was shocked by the frequency. I really enjoyed every part of our visit here.
After about an hour in the Colosseum (visits go quickly when there are no crowds to shove past), we walked up Palatine Hill next door and took in some history and views, then called upon Rick again to show us the Forum. The Forum was very impressive as well and I was really glad to have some kind of audio guide. All three of these attractions are covered on one 16€ ticket, and I hear a hack to beating summertime lines for Colosseum tickets (if you didn’t buy online) is to buy from the Forum ticket office and then walk the 5 minutes down to the Colosseum from there.
Having had enough history for one morning, we crossed the river to visit the neighborhood of Trastevere, stopping for gelato on Isola Tiberina halfway across the Tiber (it was good; Kelsey says the best, I disagree). We got into Trastevere and played a game where we wandered streets and whenever we came to an intersection, we just walked whichever way looked cuter. We had a very cute walk until the street we were on dumped out onto an industrial boulevard. We consulted a map then.
Wandering the streets towards the center of the neighborhood, we were stopped in our tracks by the smell of fresh-baking bread. We looked up the restaurant, Frontoni Trastevere, where the smell was coming from and it seemed to be legit, so we walked in and were treated to some incredible food. The place was empty except for a very lively Italian man serving up panze, which is a fresh-baked length of soft bread, almost like soft pizza crust, cut in half, opened up, and stuffed with a filling. We ordered two with braised sausage and pork and it was a revelation. He also had these things he was calling napolelles which were like buns made of dough topped with olive oil and the brightest- and freshest-tasting tomato sauce I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Oh, and they were still warm from the oven. This place was my favorite find of our trip—I desperately wish we could eat more of that. I took a chocolate bun to go…so, so good. We wandered a bit more after and stopped in a café for an Aperol soda for Kelsey, wine for me, and people-watching for both of us. We then walked our way back home for a nap.
Post-nap, we had a plan to hike up to the Terrazza del Gianicolo across the river for a view of the city at sunset. We were just about a third of the way there when I felt the weight of liquid hitting my chest. I looked down and I was covered in white and brown sludge on both sides of my vest. Y’all, this was the third time in 8 months or so that I had been unloaded upon by a bird, and when I say this, I don’t mean that something nasty hit my car or something. I mean that I personally had been shat on by a bird 3 times in the past 8 months. Something is wrong with me. Anyways, we rushed into a restaurant and got most of the way cleaned up. Kelsey finished the job later on with a defunct fountain and her bare hand—the things you do for love. Luckily, it was just my water-resistant vest and not my water-resistant hair, so it cleaned up relatively well. The view was worth the uphill trek, but maybe not the bird poop.
We walked back down and into the bustle of Trastevere and into a wine bar and prosciutteria. Kelsey made me order the food (normally she does because, well, I just don’t like to) which was a bit of a disaster. I ordered something that I was expecting to cost 18€ but the register said 41€, so that caused a lot of anxiety (turns out that was the total from the last person, not me!). We had a mediocre mixed antipasti board and a very lovely bottle of Italian red. While there, we were looking for places to go for dinner and realized that there were about 5 very excellent restaurants within 5 minutes of us, and we could only go to one. We finally picked one, and the deciding factor was that it had a real live pasta nonna in front of the restaurant hand-making everyone’s pasta. I had a stewed veal and gnocchi plate and Kelsey had a thick braided pasta alla gricia, which is just pasta with a ton of pecorino cheese and guanciale (like bacon but better)—this was Kelsey’s favorite meal of the trip; mine would come the next day. We also had another bottle of wine (I can feel you judging, please stop). The wine, with the help of melatonin and Benadryl, lifted us to a glorious feat: our first full night of sleep.
The next day, after sleeping in, we held a pizza competition between two places nearby that had been recommended to us—Forno Campo di Fiori and Forno Roscioli. It wasn’t a real competition because we had pizza rosso from Campo di Fiori and pizza bianca from Roscioli, but the pizza rosso from Campo di Fiori was far and away tastier. I just don’t know what they do to their tomato sauce over there to make it so delicious. Like a pair of heathens, we traipsed through the streets of Rome eating our pizza to go and visited the sights from our first night, this time in the day. We spent some more time with the fountains in Piazza Narvona, went inside the Pantheon (an incredible experience, and again guided by Rick), and walked to the Spanish Steps (still not symmetrical). We had a date with the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel at 2:30pm, so we started to wander to the other side of the river, stopping for gelato adjacent to Piazza Cavour, a plaza that in almost any other city would be a centerpiece of the city but here is just a footnote.
We continued over to the Castel Sant’Angelo, an enormous round castle that dates back almost 2000 years. We didn’t go in but admired from afar while we picked out a lunch spot. Being so close to the Vatican, there wasn’t a ton of good stuff to choose from, but I found a tiny little restaurant called Rione XIV that got good reviews. We had to wait about 15 minutes but the food was incredible, so all is forgiven. I had rigatoni carbonara—again super yellow and al dente, which I guess is just how I like it now—and Kelsey had some kind of pasta alla amatriciana, with a spicy tomato sauce and guanciale. Afterwards Rick breezed us through the Vatican Museum, which was welcome because there’s just too much stuff in there to really take in on your own. The start of our visit was hectic. I had to make an emergency stop in the bathroom once we were inside, which ended up being about a quarter mile away—I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to Kelsey. Then, we started our audio tour with Rick, and he kept talking about how we should be in front of this giant bronze sculpture of a pinecone. It seemed so distinctive, but we just couldn’t find it. Turns out it was under renovation and all covered up. Once we found where it was supposed to be, things got a lot smoother. The part of our visit to the Vatican we were both most looking forward to was the Sistine Chapel, which we found initially a little disappointing (I don’t really know what I was expecting, but the chapel itself just seemed…small), but as we stood there longer and longer, taking it all in, and contemplating the incredible effort that it took and how incredible a feat this type of artistry was, it really became a lot more impressive and meaningful. After we left the museum, we walked into St. Peter’s Square and admired the basilica from afar—the line to enter was at least half a mile long. We walked our sore selves back to our neck of the woods and packed our bags for our next adventure in Florence.
That night, we got Aperol Spritzes on the plaza (and I successfully haggled with the waitress to get the happy hour pricing that they were advertising but didn’t give us at first) and went to a very forgettable (and pricey) wine bar to pass the time before our dinner reservation at Armando al Pantheon. This restaurant is, as you may have guessed, right next to the Pantheon, but despite its touristy location, it serves up some of the best-reviewed classic Roman food in the city. Kelsey had picked this place and made a reservation months in advance, and for some reason I was expecting a big, boisterous restaurant but instead we were treated to a small place with maybe 10 tables packed with a mix of locals and tourists. The advice we had been given was to order every course because all the food is fantastic, and I completely agree. I ordered a random bottle of wine from Sardinia which ended up being incredible, and we started with some of the better pasta alla gricia that we would have in Rome. The star of the show, however, was the lamb chop that we split next. It was simple—just a seared lamb chop. But it was perfectly seasoned, crispy on the outside, and tasted like it’d been fried in some very flavorful olive oil. Kelsey said it was her favorite dish of the whole trip, but she also said that about at least three other things, so there’s that. Dessert was a very yellow and delicious tiramisu paired with some kind of dessert wine, which I liked a lot and so did Kelsey. I don’t think we could have asked for a better last dinner in Rome. Between the food and the atmosphere, it was perfect.
Once dinner was over, it was about 11pm, so we took advantage of the late hour to spend some time (almost) alone admiring the Pantheon — there were literally five other people in the whole square. It’d also been almost 12 hours since the last time we had gelato, which I think violates Italian law, so we got some and headed up to the Trevi fountain. At almost midnight on a Monday, we had the place to ourselves, which was pretty magical. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kelsey be so content. I decided that I wouldn’t make the first move to get up, so we sat there for well over half an hour. Finally, we wandered back through empty streets (too empty at times, if you ask me) to our apartment. Once we got to a well-lit stretch of street with some other people nearby, we whipped out the phone and sang “On an Evening in Roma” together until we made it back to our apartment.
The next morning was our last one in Rome. We packed up our stuff and trudged directly to Forno Campo di Fiori for one last pizza rosso before taking the bus to the train station. We got to the train station early 1) because we had to check out of our Airbnb earlier than I thought when I was doing the logistics plan and 2) because we heard rumblings that there was some kind of food hall thing there that was worth checking out. At first, we were very lost and very confused trying to find this food hall, but we finally found it outside of the main terminal and down the street a bit. This market has stalls from famous Roman chefs curated such that all sorts of different foods are represented. We sampled pizza and a maritozzo (sweet bun with cream filling) from famed baker Gabriele Bonci’s stall. Not bad for train station food, for sure! We also finally got our hands on a fried artichoke (carciofo alla giudia), a Roman specialty. All our food boxes now checked, we walked back to the station and boarded our train for a painless 90-minute trip up to Florence for part two of our Italian adventure.
If you’ve made it this far, I think it goes without saying that our time in Rome was magical. The weather was absolutely perfect every day, the crowds were nowhere to be found, nearly every one of our culinary experiences was not only great but unforgettable, and the never-ending parade of top-flight cultural and historical sites wowed us. I can’t think of any other place I’ve been, maybe besides Paris, where I’ve finished my time there and thought, “Wow, I could do that again right now.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kelsey as happy as she was chowing down on carbs in Rome and I’m so very happy and grateful that we got to have this experience together just two weeks before things in Italy took a turn for the worst. Once this pandemic is in the rearview mirror, Rome will be at the top of our list.
Planners on the Go 