A potential downside to the Grand Hotel Le Rocce, here outside the city of Gaeta, in the southern half of Italy … is the stairs. The hotel is built into a cliff. Ingeniously so. The builder(s) took advantage of every bit of semi-flat area to build a pavilion or a little garden and, eventually, five […]

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  First night in Gaeta, searching for a place to eat. After looking for longer than we should have, especially had we bothered to look at a map, we found our way to the older part of town, around the port. We found an open restaurant, and we could see a large group inside being […]

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  And now for the indolent half of Italy 2013. This country, you may have noticed on a map, has hundreds of miles of coast, and a person might reasonably expect the existence of lots and lots of seaside hotels and retreats … and a person would be right. Three years ago, we did a […]

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And so we packed and left the tiny apartment  in Trastevere and joined up with (what we have found to be) the typically not-quite-honest Rome cabbie, who delivered us to Termini for not quite 18 euros. Seeing as how the meter had read 13-something, when we got out, how it ended near 18 is a […]

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  Sure, it’s a little odd. When on vacation we sometimes go to the movies. In Paris. In Rome. It would not be unreasonable to expect that, on only the seventh day in Rome, something historical or important remained unseen or unexplored. But, sometimes, you just don’t feel like making the effort. Instead, we went […]

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The Sistine Chapel may be the No. 1 tourist destination in the world, the top-of-the-list individual site for everyone who comes to Rome. Which makes seeing it … a test of character and patience. You are in competition with much of the planet to see the place with your own eyes. Some of the most […]

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  One of the best-known works pertaining to Rome and the Vatican and Rome from the past few decades is, sad to say, Dan Brown’s very schlocky popular novel: Angels and Demons. The book came out in 2000, and the Tom Hanks movie in 2009. I began to reread the book, just ahead of coming […]

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It is easy to forget that the touristy part of Rome is quite compact. A person can walk across it, or from top to bottom, in perhaps a half hour, if hills are avoided and tourists don’t choke the sidewalks too much. It was another wonderful day, temps in the 70s, mostly sun (an intense […]

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As mentioned previously, I have not spent any time inside the city of Rome since 1990. Two weeks then, and 10 days in 1987, while covering sports events … and I saw more than a few sights. But I never saw a Rome as overrun by tourists as I did today.

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So, Sunday morning on the northern edge of Rome’s Trastevere district. What is the handiest tourist/cultural site available at, say, 9:30 a.m.? That would be the Vatican, where we blundered into a fairly significant day in Roman Catholic history — the day a saint-making record was celebrated in Saint Peter’s Square. Later, we had the […]

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