Day 3: Valentine's Day in Rome

We started our day today by sleeping in-yay! After getting very little sleep during our travels the day before, we all needed to recover a bit. We got up late, had a breakfast of croissants from the bakery across the street and suited up to go to the park up the road. It is Valentine's Day so we exchanged some Valentine's and candy before heading out. Mitch, Lynn and Molly did an awesome 3-4 mile run amongst a variety of ancient Roman ruins. It was so cool!

Around every turn was yet another site that had to be like 2000 yeas old, we found out later it was the site of an ancient Gladiator school. How facsinating is that?! And there we were taking a morning jog in the midst of it all. We felt like international runners, it was really fun!

Aunt Beth supervised the other kids in the park. They played soccer and ran around in the sunshine.
After the park we picked up some things from the local shops to eat and drink and came back to the apartment for some lunch.




After getting cleaned up and chilling for awhile
we decided to head into town to do some shopping and go to dinner. We fed some left over croissants to the fish in the little fountain in the court yard of our apartment building. Cousin Charlotte's idea, but all the kids loved it.


Then our adventure really began when we got on the bus going the wrong way from the Colliseum! Poor Aunt Molly was getting a bit car sick by the time we realized we had been on the bus way too long. Navigating a bus system communicated in a language you don't fully understand is not the easiest thing we have ever done-LOL!

We found ourselves at the other end of town near Vatican City. We wanted to go to Piazza Navona and Campo di Fioro so we had to get off near the Tiber River and walk the rest of the way. The good news is we found a nice little corner grocery on our walk and got some goodies to take home and breakfast for tomorrow. We finally got to our destination and did a bunch of souvenier shopping. We mostly shopped around Campo di Fiori. Fiori means flowers and the square has Fiori in it's name because it has a big outdoor flower market at one end. There are also artists, music and lots of shops and restaurants. There is a lively night life there so it was a fun place to shop in the evening!

Ben got all the soccer stuff he could handle, Mitch got a very Roman looking winter scarf and a cool leather bracelet and Mom got a "to die for" purple leather purse.

After that we found a really great and reasonably priced restaurant for dinner. We sat in a section that was an excavated area of old Rome. Rome is built in several layers. Over the centuries, rather than tear down old structures and replacing them, they have typicaly just built right over them. The street level of modern day Rome is about 20 feet higher than it once was. At various places around town you can see where they have excavated and uncovered the long buried ruins of old buildings that had long been buried. That is the type of building we dined in tonight and sat to eat in this little underground groto. It was SO Roman!
Since it was Valentine's Day there were many romantic couples in the restaurant. In we came with our group of 7, including a teenager and 3 younger kids. Part way through dinner, at the next table a trio came in and began serenading the women sitting behind us. They sang love songs and gave her a long stemmed rose and a note from her true love who is apparently overseas somewhere and wanted to hire this trio to come to where she was and express his love for her. It was very sweet and everyone in the restaurant clapped and cheered!
When we had eaten and been thoroughly entertained we headed back to the apartment. We took a bus to the main Termini train station and then took the Metro subway back to our apartment stop.
On the walk back we noticed the old buildings all along the way had incredibly tiny doors. We took pictures of the kids next to them, Mitch's head almost reached the top of the door jam! Another interesting detail about this awesome city. What a fun day of experiencing Rome!

Ciao for now!