Rome (Opulence)

Indonesia marked the first trip where Warren and I indulged in any real luxuries (eating all meals at restaurants, massages, no camping, etc.) but Italy marked the first trip where we had every single night booked prior to departure -whoa! It was our honeymoon, after all, and we wanted to spend every spare second romancing. ;)

We arrived in Rome at 8 AM and cleared customs?!? Italian customs are a joke really. I felt really ripped off when the customs officer pretended to glance over at my passport and DID NOT stamp it! I don't particularly enjoy clearing customs, nor do like that feeling of wondering if they'll let you in (even though you know there is no reason they shouldn't), but the reward is typically (well, always unless your going to Italy) a nice fat stamp on your passport. It's much more of a process for me to enter my own country. Well, we took our luggage and our unstamped passports to our hotel, then proceeded to find some food, duh. I'll be honest that I don't remember much about this first meal, but some of my life's most memorable meals were in Rome.

Rome is a great place to begin an Italian adventure. For starters, we dove straight in to the very iconic-historic-monumental sites. It was really great to see all of these Roman sites first because it made the rest of the trip that much more meaningful, to know where Italy really began. St. Peter's Basilica, which is the largest church in the world, is really mind-blowing. It was larger than life and surprisingly full of so many dark, mysterious creatures and so much wonderful symbolism. I have a particular fascination with keys (really old fashion ones) and St. Peter's famous saintly symbol is a key. Legend has it that Jesus gave St. Peter the keys to heaven (how's that for responsibility?)

Of course, we also visited the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel doesn't feel much like a chapel and it is jam packed with visitors all day long. The voting of each new pope occurs in this chapel and a few other ceremonies, but the majority of the time it functions to shuffle tourists in-and-out so that we can see something iconic. I don't usually buy into this sort of travel mindset, but the SC was actually worth the two hour wait. If you can squeeze yourself into a corner and find a moderately comfortable position with your neck arched back, it's quite fascinating to look over and over. It would have been quite cool to meet Michelangelo and chat over a cup of coffee.

It was definitely worth an afternoon looking at the Colosseum and the ancient Roman ruins, but a great bit of imagination is required, because there isn't too much left of them. I expected that they would be my favorite, but suprisingly the Vatican City had the most of offer me, besides the restaurants. ;)

Italy is a locavore's heaven. Each part of the country offers different types of foods, depending on proximity to the ocean, which cheeses/wines/veggies/animals are locally produced/grown, and what is historically eaten in that region. In Rome, we began to stretch our stomachs for our eating tour of Italy. Italians typically eat three courses at each meal (it's rude really to eat less than two): a starter, a first plate (almost always pasta and usually meatless - unless the meat is cooked in the sauce), a second plate (usually meat, with a side of veg) and dessert/after dinner drinks/coffee (usually all of the above). Eating dinner typically takes at least two hours or more and lunch doesn't take much less time. We tried to make a 8:00 reservation for dinner our first night in Rome and were told that no reservation is needed before 8:30.

Rome is a great place to begin eating your way through Italy because it offers a sampling of the country's cuisine. The spaghetti carbonara (which I will likely spend the rest of my life attemping to recreate) was my favorite Roman dish. It is so deliciously simple pasta-pig-pepper meal and I think it's the dish which can hold the maximum amount of cracked pepper without overdoing it. That much cracked pepper in ANY other meal would really be absurd. Also, on the top of the list were creamy artichoke lasagna, battered and fried zucchini flowers, a ham/salami/egg!/mushroom calzone, and our first Italian pizzas. It's possible that I never ate at the right pizza joint. I can't rave about the pizza in Italy, but nearly everything else I put in my mouth was perfection (and that's really an understatement).

After three days in Rome, we were already eating more than is really natural in one sitting and ordering wine by liter. We settled into Italy nicely.