Rome, Day 1

We slept very soundly last night--the kids were actually up before we were! For breakfast, we had an assortment of things from yesterday's shopping trip: bread, packaged toast, Nutella, ham, yogurt, tea.

The two loads of laundry I did yesterday were nice and dry this morning (thanks to the drying rack I found in the bedroom closet), so i threw another load of clothes in this morning. It took a while yesterday to decipher the Italian instructions for the washer, but eventually I figured it out. We then packed up our garbage and took it with us, leaving it in a Dumpster as indicated in the directions we were given.

We stopped briefly so that John and Matt could get their daily doses of coffee (no coffee maker in the apartment, and neither one of them wants to drink instant coffee), then headed out to today's destination.

We started at Palatine Hill:



Here's Matt standing on the site of the Roman emperor's throne:



Here we are in front of the Basilica of Constantine:



The Arch of Titus:




Basilica Aemilia:



For lunch, we went to the Hostaria Nerune, as recommended in the Rick Steves guidebook.

We started off with a fabulous antipasto misto, which I didn't get a picture of because we were starving. It had ham, delicious salami, artichoke in oil, olives, fried mushrooms, some sort of fritter with vegetables, eggplant, onions, anchovies, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. Delicious!

For the main course, Beth had "Coniglio alla cacciatora" (rabbit):



Matt had "Bocconcini di vitella con purè" (veal):



John had "Pollo alla Romana con Peperoni":



And I had "Aliciotti fritti" (anchovies):



After lunch, we headed to the Colosseum.







We went back to the little grocery store and stocked up, then headed back to the apartment. After cooling off for a little while, Beth, John, and I went out to find Beth a pair of shorts. (She didn't like the capris she packed for the trip). We started at a department store that was described as the equivalent of a JC Penney, but it looked like it was going out of business, and we couldn't find anything. We did come across a bigger supermarket, where we got a little more fruit and some fancier pasta.

On the way home, I stopped at the "Internet Point" and uploaded my last two blog entries. It was really entertaining trying to navigate Windows (I'm a Mac user) in Italian. I was stymied for a while by the lack of a tilde on the keyboard (a personal website that I use every day has a tilde in the URL), but it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at an Internet-connected computer, and I couldn't be the first American looking for the tilde, so I Googled it and discovered that the magic key combo was ALT 126. The final stumbling block was trying to remove my personal data from the machine: it's been years since I've used Windows in any flavor, and I had no idea in English, much less Italian, where to clear the cookies, cache, and history. Google was my friend again, and I think I did it right!

For dinner, we had rigatoni (with parmesan and choice of red sauce or pesto) and some pork chops that I sauteed with a little olive oil, salt, and garlic powder. Dessert was a mini-watermelon. Yum!