Rome Sweet Rome

We stayed at Armarndo's Airbnb stay 🏠 and it was PERFECT! He completely undersold this place which was in a great location, around the corner from Piazza Navona and Piazza Fiori! Armando was so helpful and I would recommend this accomodation to anyone on a city break to Rome.

On our first day in Rome we hopped straight to it and visited Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Del Popolo. We also made it to the Spanish Steps to find that they were closed, no thanks to Bvlgari!!😣

We later found out that a few of the famous Rome landmarks and attractions have recently been closed off due to luxury fashion designers funding a restoration or clean up of the site in order to promote their fashion brand. Tods shoe designer recently cleaned the Colosseum which cost them 25 million Euros 💵.

We booked onto a tour of the Roman Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Roman Forum. Although it was good to have a guided tour we did feel that our time in the colosseum was a bit rushed and Steve would have liked to have taken more photos.

On that note, Steve's photo count is at 1,824! We're going to have fun selecting the ones to put into this year's holiday photo book... (which has become a yearly tradition now 😊). Who's turn is it this year Steve??? 😉

We also visited the Vatican Museums and THANKFULLY hopped, skipped and jumped right past the 2 hour long queue to get in! "neh neh 😆" couldn't help but feel smug that we booked online in advance. Later in the afternoon we climbed to the top of St Peter's cupola (dome) for great views across the city.

It's got to the point that I don't know what day of the week it is any more, I just count the number of nights I have in a city and be mindful that we have a train or a plane to catch! 😍 #earlyretirementOkumaya devam et