After seeing my pictures from Milan, my dad was suddenly very keen on heading to Rome – so we did a little research and ended up finding a good deal for a long weekend. Here is part two of my Italian Weekend Diaries sharing my time in Rome in December, it was nice having someone to share my time in Italy with this time – and Rome is somewhere I’d definitely return to again in the future for a slower paced trip. *This trip was taken in December 2019, some things may be the same/different*

Day 1

Our first stop in Rome was of course the famous Colosseum – for this we booked tickets in advance so headed there first thing after breakfast. Rome is a very walkable city, so the walk through the streets was lovely and not too long. We stayed at the Mascagni Luxury Rooms & Suites (I would definitely recommend, it was such a beautiful hotel!) which was right near the Rome Termini main train station, and the walk to the Colosseum was around 20-25 minutes. We first spent some time walking around the outside of the building before going in for our time slot – we didn’t book tickets to go onto the arena floor, but we had a good experience seeing the architecture and learning about the history. It was quite busy, but everyone did seem to keep moving and it was never too crowded which was really nice. We spent a couple of hours in the Colosseum before heading over to the adjacent Palatine Hill and Roman Forum (entry was included with Colosseum tickets). The Palatine Hill was very quiet, and it seemed like many visitors were giving this a miss – but we really enjoyed it, there were amazing views over different areas of the city and plenty of buildings or ruins to see. After an hour there we headed to the Forum, somewhere else where we spent a few hours, there really is so much to see in this area and so much history to discover. The paths here could be quite narrow and it did get a little crowded at the more popular buildings, but alike in the Colosseum, groups did tend to move on relatively quickly. After leaving the Forum we headed around to the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II and the Campidoglio square where there are more amazing views over the Forum, Palatine Hill and on over to the Colosseum. It was a little of a hike to get up to the viewpoints here, but completely worth it, I wouldn’t skip this! This pretty much took us all day, and with the shorter days in the Winter it was already starting to get dark so we ended our day with a little shopping and finding somewhere for dinner (not a difficult feat, Italian food is my favourite so there were almost too many places to choose from!).

Day 2

On our second full day we had to tick off the rest of the major sites of the city, so we got an earlier start to still be able to get in some wandering around the streets! There are so many beautiful buildings along every street in Rome, I just loved all the colours. We saw the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona among others but didn’t have a lot of time to stop as we had tickets and a time slot for the Vatican Museums. We were shocked at the sheer number of visitors at the Vatican Museums, having been to many famous museums and galleries across Europe, I’ve never seen one as busy and crowded as this. To be honest, the number of people really didn’t make the visit an enjoyable one, there were so many tour groups that it was quite loud with guides telling their groups about different artefacts, and there wasn’t really opportunity to go slowly or stop at anything we might have wanted to see because there were just so many people. We really thought the start of December would have been a bit of a slower holiday season, but apparently not! We did stop by the Sistine Chapel which was very beautiful – photography/videography are not allowed in here and there are both regular signs and guards making sure everyone was aware of this. You couldn’t really spend a lot of time here are people were really being ushered along quite swiftly by the guards. Maybe we just unknowingly picked a busy time to visit, but the experience didn’t make me want to return. On the plus side, the cafe was quite nice and was relatively quiet haha XD