Friday 7th Oct

Just had a day and half in Rome. This maybe a theme for me but it was crowds, crowds and more crowds.  There does not seem to be any letup in the continual stream of people that visit these ancient sites. I can only assume it is 365 days a year, apart from certain “holidays”.  I am not one standing in queues and much prefer to be moving.  So the only queuing I allowed my self was in a guided tour of the Vatican, it’s museum and the Sistine Chapel. Of course had to pay extra for it but we did walk past the queues lined up for the day tickets and we did have ‘Rudi’ to feed us information all the way round.  

We started the tour at 9 AM and even at that time it was busy or should I say packed. If you have never been inside the public area of the Vatican I would say do it you are ever in Rome. It really is very splendid, but at the same time very over indulgent, given the majesty of it all.

Rome is a lot easier to get about than Florence was. Florence is just completely narrow roads a bit like old parts of London.  There are very few cycling lanes that I could see loads of toad side parking that compresses the moving lanes again and a mess of one way streets, still I suppose it is what you get use to.

Rome felt a lot better and I used the Metro network the most. As it goes to, or close to most of the major sites that I had time for