When in Rome!

This is my last post about Italy!  If you guys have not read about Florence and Cinque Terre, go to the older posts first because Rome was actually our last stop!!


Day 1

We arrived in Rome early that night so we decided to fit some stuff in since we only had 2 days to explore the whole city!  That night we chose to go to walk down the main commercial street in Rome, Via del Corso.  We went first to the Piazza del Popolo, which we really knew nothing about other than that it was a big thing on tourist map...so we gave it a shot!

We walked down that street and went to the Trevi Fountain!  And yes, I threw 2 coins into the fountain for good luck and so I'll at some point go back to Rome :-)

A restaurant was suggested to us by some friends and it was in the 'Jewish Ghetto' which I promise is safer than it sounds!  We walked through the Piazza Venecia and saw a really pretty monument, again, I don't really know what it was for but it was pretty!  Unfortunately, the restaurant required reservations so we had to walk all the way back to the other side of the city pretty much, but we did get to walk past the Colosseum at night which was pretty cool!

Day 2

We woke up incredibly early this day to get to the Vatican Museum!  We found a line and just assumed it was to get into the Vatican Museums but unfortunately, we were mistaken.  On the bright side, it wasn't a long wait.  It was actually going to St. Peters Basilica because as it turns out, it was Pope Day!  Unfortunately, someone told us he was speaking at 1, when in reality it was at 10.  So we had already left for the Vatican Museum line and ended up missing the Pope speaking, which would have been fun!  But, oh well!  We ended up only waiting about 45 minutes to get into the museums which is pretty much unheard of.  In total we spent about 3 hours exploring the Vatican Museum.  It was really fun to see all of the art, especially the Sistine Chapel.  You weren't technically allowed to take photos of it, but I snuck a photo because my camera doesn't have a flash and I didn't think it was going to hurt anyone.  To be honest, the Sistine Chapel was very beautiful, but so was every other ceiling in the Vatican.  I guess I just had very high expectations going into it.  Either way, it was still a cool thing to see, and I can cross it off my bucket list :-)

Afterwards, we went, a second time to St. Peters Basilica.  This time, we actually got to go inside of it!  One of the prettiest churches I've ever seen by far!

We were literally exhausted by the time we were done with all of the touring and walking so we went back to our hostel and slept for about 3 hours!  We went out for dinner that night and ate some of the BEST pizza I've ever had.  It was recommended to us by our friends and we ended up waiting for 45 minutes but it was definitely worth the wait!  We even decided, since it was our last dinner in Italy, to buy a calzone-type desert that was filled with Nutella.  It was pure heaven on earth!  A great way to spend our last night in Italy :-)

Day 3

Thursday was our last day in Italy!  We left the Colosseum for Thursday morning since it was something we would only want to spend a few hours at.  Unfortunately, the metro was INCREDIBLY packed on the way there.  Britt had a leather backpack that was cinched closed and buckled and someone still managed to steal her wallet!  I have no idea how no one even noticed it going on, but needless to say it definitely put a damper on our morning.  We didn't notice until we were going to pay for our tour through the Colosseum.  She wanted to go back to the hostel and call to cancel her debit card but we convinced her that she would regret not doing the tour so we paid for her to go on it and successfully put the incident out of our minds for a few hours.  So we took a guided tour of the Colosseum and then went back to the hostel and got it all taken care of!  

So, my adventures in Italy came to a close!  We went out for one last lunch...which actually turned out to be really delicious even though we just randomly picked a restaurant!  We left for the airport and fortunately, all the flights went as planned!  Apparently we were really lucky because there were bad storms in Madrid that kept a lot of our friends there over night!

Hope you all have had a wonderful week!!  Have a happy Easter!  It's definitely going to be weird to not be with my grandparents and family,  I'll be thinking of you all :-)  Less than 5 weeks until I'm home, which sounds crazy to me, but I can't wait to see everyone!