Rome — Day One

Roma!

After an easy plane ride from the States, in seats complete with our own personal tv screens, we arrived at Termini and must have found the best taxi driver in all of Rome. When we arrived at the street address where our apartment was supposed to be, he promptly got on the phone to make sure we were at the right place. The apartment was nothing to write home about, so we won’t, but it was in the very best part of town, the Campo Marzio. Its narrow medieval streets are the very ones Caravaggio himself walked―and so did we. Immediately we headed out for a walk, stopping first at S’Agostino to see Caravaggio’s stunning Madonna of Loreto. Unbelievably, there was one else in the church, and when we looked at this painting, the sweet fatigue on Mary’s face and the light of hope on the the upturned faces of the kneeling peasants say more than you could hear in a thousand Sundays at church.

From there we wandered the streets around the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona, ending up at ristorante Due Colonne for a perfect Roman lunch (pranzo). Gnocchi with clams for me, and rigatoni ameritriciani for Bob.

This is the same restaurant where I had the fabulous gnocchi when I was last in Rome in November. After lunch, as much as we resisted, we had to have a nap. Then it was another walk, out to the river Tiber, where Bob took many photographs from Ponte Sant’Angelo.

We walked along the river up to Ponte Sisto and over to Trastevere, where we stopped in at the Almost Corner Bookshop. I think this is the best English language bookstore in Rome and I always find something interesting there I’ve never seen before. Almost directly across from the bookstore is a bakery, Al Forno, with some of the best pizza in Rome.

We shared a slice topped with squash blossoms and anchovies, and this was just our first day in Italy!