We arrived in Rome, Fiumicino, on Sunday afternoon, and our contact person was waiting for us at the airport. We jumped into the car, and spent the next hour and a half or so in the busy traffic of the Rome “centura” (I think it’s “by-pass” in English), for a trip that would have taken 15 minutes or so in Helsinki. For a while, both the driver and us tried to sustain some sort of conversation, but with his lack of English knowledge and our lack of Italian, we gave in to an uncomfortable silence soon. Too bad, he seemed like a nice, warm guy. Finally, we arrived in Ciampino, Rome’s other airport town, and the location of our accommodation.
Although Lore and I agreed (and re-stated throughout our stay) that the location wasn’t the most fortunate, we had to admit that the place itself was beyond our expectations: everything was in place, every detail was tastefully taken care of. The interior was perfectly clean and had wonderful Italian furniture, the garden was also in perfect shape, and the relaxing sofas on the terrace were..very inviting, especially tired as we were after the wedding. On top of that, a wonderful smell filled the air (coming from a type of flowers all the houses there had – we’re not sure yet if it was Jasmine or something else). In short, this was the place we reluctantly left each day for a few hours to do touristy things, just so that we wouldn’t feel guilty of being in Rome and not visiting anything.
Some time after checking in, we realized we would be getting hungry at some point, so we went out to eat. There were two places to choose from, (a restaurant and a pizzeria, recommended by our host) and one of them was closed (the restaurant) – so we had an easy choice. We had a pizza and a salad (Lore wasn’t too hungry), water (from a glass bottle) and wine. The salad was ok (we discovered that just like in Romania, the salad is just a side-dish there, never a main course), but the pizza was great! Real mushrooms, juicy sauce…well, it’s hard to describe – but it was the kind of pizza you probably only find in Italy. The bill was also ok, so we were picking up our hopes for Rome. We went to get some rest, and get ready for our first day of Rome.
The next day we had a long breakfast, and didn’t feel like hurrying to get to the city. We were finally ready to leave about 1-2pm, so we decided to go out for lunch in town before taking the local train to Rome. We went for the restaurant this time (the pizzeria was closed), and the experience here wasn’t as good. The food was too salty for us, the bar-tender (where we went to pay before leaving) was bitter, and we were first introduced to the “service charge”, a sort of mandatory tip they seem to charge at will around here. We decided not to go back there again. Then, to Rome. Since we didn’t have much time for Rome, we took the easy choice: the Colosseum. While preparing ourselves for the long line and wondering how long it was going to take, a person came by and announced that the last guided tour in English was on in 15 mins, so if we wanted a guided tour, (and the extra charge) we could just jump in front to some reservations office and buy it from there. Sounded good – we’re lazy when it comes to getting information ourselves, but having some of it to go with an old building is a good idea – so we went for it. Unfortunately, the tour was so poor that I had a strong urge to go get my money back in the first 5 minutes of it. The guide, who had a strong Italian accent, (and apparently a complete lack of interest or passion for what she was saying) was speaking into a microphone, and we had some radios that we were supposed to listen to. Combine the strong accent with the poor sound quality, and it meant we could only understand about 50% of what she was saying, and that only because we tried to stick close enough to her not to need the radio receiver. Nevertheless, the building was quite impressive, and after the tour, we walked around, took some photos and enjoyed the view.

After the Colloseum came the most…interesting moment of our stay in Rome. After walking a bit in the touristic center, we were getting hungry, so we decided to eat there in the touristy area, instead of waiting to get to our pizzeria. Big mistake! The place we chose (Al Presidente) had outrageous prices, not very good food, arrogant waiters and an awful service. We ended up in a verbal fight with the waiters and the owner of the place, who was very aggressive and even cursed us in our own language! We learned later that the place had 1.5 stars out of 5 on Google (1 being the worst possible), but it was too late! We had already fallen into this “tourist trap”, like many other unfortunate souls there that night.
The next day we tried to report the incident to some sort of Consumer Protection – and our host was extremely helpful with this – but it seems that either reporting these kinds of things is impossible in Italy (the authority responsible requires filing a Police (“Carabinieri|”) report before doing anything, or the Carabinieri of the area were hand-in-hand with these and other guys (they wouldn’t take in our report). So we decided to just forget it and go on with our honeymoon.
The rest of our stay in Rome was touristy and pretty ok: visiting the Palatino and the Roman Forum (that was very nice, by the way), viewing a show of “History of Rome in 5D” (interactive, pretty interesting, maybe a bit childish to our taste), eating ice-cream and taking photos.

Finally, we left for our boat, and my feelings with Rome were mixed: huge noise and bad traffic, spread around buildings that really seem from another world, bad, unscrupulous services mixed with warm, helpful people, and great dining places waiting to be found by those who have the time and patience to go look for them.

PS. If you’ve read this far, you deserve the link to our honeymoon photo-album

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