How to do (a tiny bit of) Rome in a day (or two)

We started by taking a taxi straight to the Vatican. I kinda knew where to stand in line from previous trips, it's not the most obvious line. We literally didn't even make it one step out of the taxi before people were offering us tours. 

Our online tickets worked perfectly! Finally, some planning that worked out :) The tickets were so good, we must have passed at least 500 people, probably much more, probably saving at least an hour. 

We walked almost every hall in the Vatican. They're beautiful, full of sculptures, paintings and other treasures.  The big finale is the Sistine Chapel. The chapel is a little smaller than you might be imagining, but it's every bit as beautiful. It's basically covered in every inch by Michaelangelo's painting. We learned that one side of the chapel has paintings about the life of Moses, the other side is about the life of Jesus. 

We left the Vatican quite fulfilled, and it was still early. We double checked and it's true that the Vatican is a separate country, so that's exciting to think about.

We took a quick break at a wine bar and did some shopping. Then we headed over to the Colloseum. We hadn't bought tickets so we jumped in the main ticket line, where we immediately saw that you can use a QR reader to download and purchase tickets while in line. Brilliant use of technology, but a big fail on my part for not having a QR reader on the phone I had! The wait was only about 30 minutes and the video guides were sold out, but we did use the audio guide (which you can skip). It's always interesting to see inside the Colloseum, hard to imagine everything that went on there a long time ago. 

We sat down for dinner and didn't even quite realise that we were literally on top of the Roman Forum ruins. It was a great view and we had fun looking up the history of the forum and what happened there. Lots of Julius Caesar if you're wondering. 

As we were walking out, an elderly couple two tables over stopped me and said something in Italian. I apologised for not understanding, and then in English they tried to say that I was very passionate or patient, I'm not sure which. Either way, I took it as a huge compliment, had a 60 second conversation with them and moved on.

On a side note, we've heard at least Bruno Mars song every day while in Italy, and Imagine Dragons almost every day. We stopped in a toy store in Rome and they had never heard of Moshi Monsters, interesting. And, I'm not sure I've seen a Starbucks in Italy?

We ended the day at Trevi Fountain, which had no water in it and was under construction. Can you believe that. They had a strange walkway that took you over where the water used to be, which had no less than 3 police officers on it. They had a tiny little bucket of water where you could still toss a coin over your shoulder for good luck. 

All in all, we've learned that even a quick hop from London to Italy requires quite a bit of planning. We're having an absolutely great time, laughing a lot, but the number of surprises has been, well, surprising :)