Rome in an hour!

Can't be done, Rome in an hour that is. It was a 90 min coach ride from the port of Civitivecchia to the centre of Rome with roughly one hour driving around the city plus a 30 min stop at one of the major sights. But, it WAS possible in this short time to get a good taste of possibly the most beautiful city we have ever seen. The architecture across the two thousand years or so of it's history is quite fantastic, ancient walls and gates as well as modern buildings in local stone blend together to such an extent that it is really hard to determine the age of something. And the sheer scale of some of the buildings and palaces and stairways is just huge. Buildings in marble, statues in marble or bronze or wrought iron are everywhere, and I think the guide said there are over 500 churches in Rome, or was it over 700 churches and more than 500 basilicas? Major sights for us were The Forum, the area around Circus Maximus, the Palatine Hill and of course The Colosseum. We stopped at the Colosseum for about 30 min for photos (and a Gelato/ice cream of gigantic proportions). Unlike the Parthenon in Athens which we enjoyed visiting a few years ago, the Colosseum impresses you with it's size too, apparently it held around 55,000 spectators to watch the gladiators hack each other to bits.

After the short stop the coach moved on for another 20 min or so around various sights until we entered the Vatical City and into St Peter's Square. This is also a very impressive place which most of us will have seen from TV when the Pope is leading a mass etc. Beautifil buildings again, lots of marble, gold, painted walls, statues, and of course the St Peter Basilica itself, the largest church in the world. (Do you know which is the second largest?).

This was an afternoon trip so we had spent the morning doing nothing much, then returned at 6.00pm in the dark rushing around to get ready for dinner etc. I think we will only ever consider morning trips again like the previous three we have had.

It's now Wednesday morning and we have turned around and begun our journey back home, cruising between Sardinia and Sicily back towards Gibraltar, out into the Atlantic stopping at Lisbon for a day on Friday. No trips booked for Lisbon, we may just take a shuttle bus into the city and have one of those bus top tours or a "yellow tram" for the morning. So it's quizzes, movies and rock & roll on board for a couple of days. Oh dear!