Fast and Curious in Rome

Okay, for those who didn't know - we were on vacation in Italy. Now we are back and there are pictures to show and stories to tell (although we can't compete with Ofer's fascinating adventures :))

So, as expected, we started with Rome. The first thing to strike us in Rome was a question: "Why for God sake there are cars on pedestrian streets?" Then we understood: there are no pedestrian streets in Rome. No matter how narrow a street is and no matter whether it has a sidewalk or not, no matter how many people are walking there - if a car can squeeze in, it will go there. Let alone scooters of course - they are everywhere. So you live in a constant fear of being run over.

On our first day we landed at 7 at the morning and went to sleep for a couple of hours after we checked into the hotel. After we woke up things happened very fast. We walked to the famous Trevi fountain.


After that we wanted to head to the Pantheon, but we lost our way and ended up near Colosseum. All the roads may lead to Rome, but inside Rome all the roads lead to the Colosseum - we found out.

Being there, we bought tickets and went inside the Roman Forum. Wandering there on our own we found a group guided by an American guide who told us that the tour was free and anybody could join. He had a nice American accent, which meant we could understand him perfectly (can't tell the same about British or any other English-speaking accent).



Turned out he was doing a free tour as a promotion for his other non-free tours. He was really good, so we took another tour with him an hour later. This way we ended up seeing most of the touristic sights in Rome in our first day there :)

On the next day we visited Colosseum and the Palatino and nothing extraordinary happened.
I'll post the pictures later in Picasa and place a link here.

One of the days we were on our way to see Piazza del Poppolo. When we got out of the subway station we saw a HUGE demonstration of Italian communists. They were going to the same direction we needed to go. Alona was wearing a red shirt, so we blended in nicely and moved along with them until our ways parted.


Some of them were carrying rainbow flags with a word "Pace" (Peace) written on them. We were kinda surprized at first, since as far as we knew communists never were big fans of the gay community, but later we figured that those flags must have some other meaning.


Later in the evening, just before the sunset we saw a scene which would make Hitchcock die of envy if he wasn't already dead. We were walking in one of the streets in the city center while we heard a distant sound of a multitude of birds. We looked up and saw this: