August 31st – September 1st

We are on another adventure – this time, Italy!

We left California roughly around 6:15 PM on the 31st. We love flying with Norwegian Airlines because they have directly flights right out of the East Bay that fly nonstop to different European locations. Cha-Ching!

We are traveling with one of our favorite couples – Jon and Yvonne. We are grateful because they are seasoned pros in Italy. Before I had the blog – we had traveled with them last year to London and Edinburgh. I don’t know if we had already left for London when Jon and I had hatched up the idea for Italy. (Grazie!)

The flight was relatively uneventful – it wasn’t full and we were able to spread out a little bit. According to my watch, I got just under five hours. I think we all got varying degrees of sleep. Regardless, the flight went by fast.

We landed in Rome about an hour early – on Sunday, September 1st. (Officially birthday month!) Jon had arranged for a fantastic shuttle service – the only slight delay was that our bags took a while to get delivered. Once they arrived we were off!

Jon and Yvonne had stayed at our hotel previously, about 10 years ago – Hotel Smeraldo. The hotel had been updated – and the two gentlemen that were working reception were wonderful. We got checked in quickly and were able to freshen up. We went for a walk in Piazza Navona – there were plenty of beautiful fountains and people hanging around in this area.

Then we stopped to have a drink and decided that now was as good as time as ever for gelato. The gelato place we stopped at was called Della Palma which had at least 150 flavors available. How does one ever decide on just one?!

We continued on our walk – and we walked past the Pantheon (which we will be visiting tomorrow). One of the coolest parts was finally getting to see Trevi Fountain. I’ve always thought that it looked so beautiful – and it truly does. Jon loaned us some change to throw in – so hopefully that means we will return at some point. (I’m hoping so – we are only scratching the surface of Italy on this trip!)

If you haven’t been to Italy there are plenty of ancient and historic sites everywhere – Jon and Yvonne had remembered one from their previous travels that had a lot of cats. Yes, cats. There were probably at least 8 lounging around in the ruins. Seems like a pretty sweet life for those felines!

(How many kitties can you count?)

We went back to the hotel and had an Aperol Spritz on the rooftop bar and watched the sunset. Rome was just as beautiful as I had imagined.

(Our hotel – Hotel Smeraldo)

We ended the night at the Bernini Restaurant – we had all wanted to order the cacio e pepe, which was one of the brothers’ favorite dishes. However, Jon and I decided to order some different dishes. I went with a four cheese gnocchi (I’ll call it a grown up version of macaroni and cheese) and Jon had a truffle pasta dish. Everything was excellent. At this point we were all dead on our feet and decided to call it a night.

I’ll write more later about our first full day in Rome – and technically, our second country while we were in Europe (Vatican City!).

Ciao!