Dinner our First Night in Italy

Italy Travelog #5
Rome - Saturday, 24 May 2025, 9pm

After we checked into our hotel just after 3pm there was plenty of time left in the day. For us it had already been a long day. 4pm Saturday is 7am Saturday in San Francisco. With the time changes we'd basically been up for most of 24+ hours, with only a nap of 2 or 3 hours on the cramped airplane flight for sleep. But even a little sleep is better than none, and the summer-y daylight in Rome helped us wake back up this afternoon.

We made reservations for dinner with the help of the hotel concierge and then walked out to the nearby plaza for a bit of shopping, about half a mile away.



A few things struck me about the convenience store in the plaza. One, it had fresh fruits and vegetables and meat and bread. ...Okay, it was more of a small grocery store than a convenience store, but for something the size of most US convenience stores it had more than just prepackaged crap, hotdog- and taquito rollers, and a beer cave. And two, while it didn't have a beer cave it had some surprisingly cheap wines. I could've bought a likely decent Italian table wine for the equivalent $2.35. Instead, though, I just bought a bottle of beer and some cookies for after dinner plus a can of soda for the next morning. It was definitely better to buy the soda for 0.95€ here than 8€ back at the Waldorf Astoria.

Speaking of the Waldorf, we went back with our bags of shopping before dinner. It would've been nice to combine the trips into a single outing, but restaurants around here don't even open for dinner until 7:30! We did our shopping at 6, and the little plaza certain wasn't interesting enough to hang out in for 90 minutes. I mean, we did look around since we had time. It's the kind of place you're done with in 5 minutes.

So, we chilled back at the hotel for an hour then walked back out, straight through the plaza again, to the restaurant the concierge had recommended, Da Luciano.

What sold Hawk on Da Luciano was— aside from the fact it was the first restaurant the concierge suggested that didn't involve the words "The menu is mostly fish" (since Hawk doesn't like fish)— was homemade pasta. Nonna makes all the pasta fresh in the morning. And to go with the pasta they have both fish and not-fish. 😅



The concierge also told us the white pizza on focaccia was a can't-miss. We didn't see a focaccia white pizza on the menu. ...Yes, I speak enough Italian— or at least enough pizza-Italian— to parse the words in Italian on the menu. So instead we took a flyer on a basic margherita pizza as an appetizer. OMG it was good! Hawk even liked it— and she hates most pizza.

The margherita pie was a good pick as an appetizer. It was light, sweet, and savory all at the same time. And the cracker thin crust— "It's on matzah!" Hawk quipped— was light and tasty. It left us plenty of room for our secondi.



Hawk ordered a plate of gnocchi. The potato pasta is her go-to pick in Italian cuisine. And hearing that it was homemade here was the key thing that go her excited to go. And Nonna's gnocchi did not disappoint. Hawk quickly pronounced it the best gnocchi she's ever had.



My secondi was veal saltimbocca. On the menu it's "Saltimbocca alla romana", but yeah, it's veal pounded thin and sauteed in a pan with ham (prosciutto) and a white wine based gravy. BTW, saltimbocca is a fun word. It means, literally, "jump into the mouth".

The saltimbocca was positively delicious. Yes, things were jumping in my mouth. 😂 I don't know if I can call it "the best I've ever tasted" like Hawk's gnocchi, though. I mean, I can, but that's a meaningless comparison as this is only the about the 3rd time ever that I've had saltimbocca as it's not common in US Italian restaurants... or the few times I've seen it on the menu it's been hideously expensive so I've tended to pick something else. This dish was I think 14€, so quite a bargain. And yes, of the 3 total meals of saltimbocca that I've had, this was at least tied for the best. 🤣

Now it's about 9pm and we're back at our hotel room. We're sitting on the balcony, having just enjoyed the sunset. I figure I'll go to bed by 10am as we'll have a busy day tomorrow touring in Rome.

Walk & Ride the Subway to the Colosseum

Italy Travelog #6
Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 10:40am

This morning we've headed out on what will be a busy day touring Rome, much of it on foot— the way we like to tour. We started with a walk from our hotel down to the nearest metro station, about a mile away. We could've taken a hotel shuttle, free, to the center of town. But as we still would've had to take a taxi from there to the Colosseum we opted to walk to the train and take the train to the Colosseum station. Riding transit is also part of how we like to tour. We like to see the city like locals. Plus, the train was just 1.50€ each, less than a short taxi ride from the shuttle stop would've cost.



The walk down to the Cipro station was fun. We saw a lot of residential Rome on our way down the hill. One thing that's interesting is how winding and jumbled together everything is. And this is a part of Rome that was built post-1950, so it's not like the streets are based on ancient cow paths. And while the streets zigzag back and forth climbing the hill our hotel sits atop, there are numerous sidewalks/stairs for pedestrians only that shortcut the route down to the train station.

It's interesting to see how close together everything is here. And the cars parked along the street are tiny. An American-style compact car— there are some of them here—looks huge by comparison. Another interesting bit we saw is that there are apparently community trash cans. Every block or so there's a line of dumpsters with labels for trash, recyclables, food waste, etc. It looks like people walk their own trash out to the community bins. That makes trash pickup simpler— and reduces the clutter of every house and apartment building having its own trashcans near the street.



From the Cipro station we rode a train into downtown and changed at the Termini station, pictured above. From there it was just a few stops south to the Colosseum. Ah, how much easier it is to get around Rome than in ancient times!



The Colosseum is right across the street from the metro stop.

We arrived early for our 10:30 tour so we walked around to see the outside of the Colosseum from different angles.



I also used different cameras. For today I'm carrying both my Fujifilm dedicated camera, which captures beautiful, rich colors as in the photo immediately above, as well as my always-in-my-pocked iPhone.

Part of our reason for walking around different sides of the Colosseum was we were trying to find where we were supposed to meet our guide. Apple Maps and Google Maps both sent us on wild goose chases to find the where "Colosseum Plaza 33" was. Different wild goose chases. It turned out our guide was meeting us right at the metro stop. There's a tiny "33" stone above the metro exit. It would've been nice for them to tell us, "Meet us right outside the metro station" before 10:35am.

Touring the Colosseum

Italy Travelog #7
Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 12:30pm

In planning our visit to the Colosseum today we debated whether to hire a tour guide. Generally we like to get around by our own wits— see also, walking and taking the subway to the Colosseum this morning. Though it's not so much that we dislike tour guides as we hate tour groups. We hate seeing/hearing just the least-common-denominator stuff and having to move as slow as the slowest group member— which, in our experience, is often a person who can barely walk and wants to stop for smoke breaks and/or gift shopping frequently. But when we were investigating how to visit the Colosseum on our own we found that it would take a lot of planning effort and still likely entail waiting in long lines when we got here— two other things that we also hate. So we booked a guided tour, a private guided tour, for a few hundred dollars.

Our guide started us out with a history of the Colosseum. It was basically an R-rated soap opera of ancient times. It was a string of one emperor who murdered another, whose mother murdered all his rivals, who then murdered his mother to consolidate power, who then was murdered by rivals without his murderous mother to protect him, et cetera.

"I'm really not interested in who murdered whom," I said with a bit of a snarky tone in my voice. I mean, it's hard not to be snarky when saying those particular words! "I'd like to spend time seeing the architecture of the Colosseum."

That's one of the nice things about private tours: you can customize them to your liking. Our guide shifted from dwelling on ancient incest and murder to taking us around the whole mezzanine level of the Colosseum and the ground level, too.



One bit of history I do remember from amid the saga of who-killed-whom was that the Colosseum was built starting in 69 CE. It took 8 years, the guide told us. "That's a long time."

"That's nothing," I shot back. "In San Francisco, where we're from, it took the city 4 years just to build a few toilets."

And to raise money— and labor— to build the Colosseum in those 4 years, the Roman Empire went out and sacked Jerusalem. They scraped out a lot of the treasure and took Jews slaves. "Wow," I quipped, "It's  like some Roman architect saw the pyramids in Egypt and said, 'We've got to hire— I mean, enslave— their construction crew!'"