We had a rather restful morning. Boiled eggs, toast and coffee we were able to cook for ourselves. We read and did some washing, getting ready for the next week when were were unsure of how we will be table to cope. We had seen a few hop-on hop-off buses on the day before: double decker, open at the top so you can see the sights, alighting and er relighting, as your mood or spousal instruction requires. When I say “a few” I mean a few hundred. We decided it might be a good idea (applying the streaker defence) to get a ticket, so went in search of a sales booth.

Maybe it is just our experience, but Italians seem to be pretty dismissive if they don’t have what you want, waving you away in a generally unspecific direction. Of course, when we found success, we also found expressive helpfulness, as the seller abandoned his shopping booth to come out into the street to show us the way. He became our brother, with much backslapping and bowing. Perhaps he had not sold many tickets up till then. We hopped on, as you do, and found some seats on the upper deck and did a lap and a half before alighting at the Colosseum. We had an irritating fellow passenger who insisted on chain-smoking and talking incessantly, his cigarette bobbing up and down on his bottom lip, flipping ash all over the place. I have to say that Italians do love to smoke and it seems that most do. Only a few places had no smoking inside restaurants.

We did not venture in to the Colosseum, as the queue to get in looked several hours long, and in any case, our Cosmos Tour includes a guided tour. So we headed off confidently in what we thought was the direction of the Piazza Venezia where there is another monumental building of extraordinary bad taste built in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Some call it the “wedding cake” and some call it “the typewriter” it sits in striking contradiction to the ancient ruins of the Roman Forum, its neighbour. Needless to say our navigation was quite awry so we had triple the walk.

Its redeeming feature is the view from the top requiring a longish climb of some steps, and then an external lift which saw Jenny clutching her eyes tightly shut as we soared above the surrounding buildings. The view of Rome was amazing and worth the euro needed to feed to elevator. The real price for the view, though, is the fact that the the building is also viewable from everywhere else, its white marble irresistibly drawing your eyes, from the dominant browns of the city’s landscape.

Monday was time to bid farewell to our nice little apartment alongside the Spanish Steps. We had booked the apartment through AirBnB, a sort of exchange where people make their homes available for short-term rental. You deal directly with the owner, and it seems a terrific way to get some fantastic digs.

Anyway, we cleaned up (as you can imagine, it was a bit of a mess after hard partying for four days) handed back the keys and set off for the Parco Terrino Hotel. Once again the cabbie seemed to find some additional kilometres that were not part of the usual route. I guess we look like tourists.

The Parco Terrino is focused just about entirely on serving the coach tourism business of Italy. Our room is spacious, but has not much else to commend it. Our room has a nice little kitchen, but no way of using it as it has no jug or any means to make a cup of tea or coffee. The kitchen has a fridge but no power point! Wifi costs a fortune so we are limiting our access. Our surroundings are much more suburban, though we are surrounded by a Christian Brothers College, a convent and other religious institutions.

For most of the day we loitered around here, going to the local shops, getting some more Euro and finding a post office so we could send a parcel home for a reasonably modest price. We needed two trips to the post office: one to buy a postal carton and make some inquiries about rates; and after returning home to bundle up all the unneeded things (Maasai blankets, ebony artefacts, gifts, the extra handbag Jenny purchased, the hard drive for the computer I lost along the way…) to actually get the parcel weighed and dispatched. A visit to to an Italian post office is worth a story in itself. It seems strangely ironic that a people who delivered so much to civilisation, through art and science, has such an inefficient way of handling a simple postal service. We wait in hope that our parcel gets delivered.

By now we have met our tour party, mainly Australians, but also quite a few Americans. So far everyone seems delightful, so that will make the next week liveable.

Today, Tuesday we have had a couple of excursions. The first was a Vatican tour, which we declined, having done a guided tour on Saturday, and instead walked up to the Castel San Angelo, a monstrous fortress built in the 15th century basically to protect the popes. It is an amazing building on the banks of the Tiber, also housing a museum with some wonderful artefacts. We climbed to the parapets and again had some expansive views of Rome and the Vatican. Best of all, it had a great little cafe where we quenched our thirst with some lemon drinks and a weight watchers raspberry tart. “Weight watchers” in the sense that you can watch your weight being added as you eat. The Colosseum tour was really good, also taking in the Roman Forum and surrounding ruins. It must have been quite a sight 2000 years ago, and it is mind-boggling to walk on paving where feet have trod for thousands of years.

Which brings us back to Parco Tirreno, where I fervently hope no feet will tread for too many more years. At the moment the corridors are infested with teenagers on some sort of excursion. They roam the corridors yelling, laughing and carrying on.

Tonight we had dinner in town, and tomorrow we head for Florence. Touristy fare.

Ciao