travelogue ~ rome, italy.

The Italy trip was amazing. I had never been to Italy and Ben has long been touting Rome as his favorite city in the world, so the bar was set high from the start. The anchor to the whole trip was Ali and Davide's wedding in Florence and Ben's parents turned it into a family trip for all of us. Very lucky! I am going to break the trip into a couple of posts, starting today with Rome.

Our trip was bookended by Rome - the perfect start and finish to the trip. In total, we really only ended up with two days but we definitely made the most of it. We landed in Rome on Friday morning and hit the ground running...

We checked into our hotel - Hotel Babuino 181 - which we would definitely recommend, did a quick change and started walking the city. First things first, Ben took me over to Sant Eustachio Il Caffe - just around the corner from the Pantheon - it is a little coffee shop and roaster that has been there since the 1930s. It is fantastic.

And from here, we began walking through the heart of Rome...our first stop was the Forno Campo di Fiori where we popped in for pizza. 

Immediatly following, we headed over to Carapina for gelato.... 

And onwards to the Coliseum. Rome is breathtaking and incredible, and obviously the Coliseum is just awesome. We opted to wait in line so that we could go in - Ben has obviously been in various times before - so it was a true gesture of love to stand in the line we did....but it was worth it...

From the Coliseum, we doubled back to visit the Arch of Constantine...

...and on to Palatine Hill. It was a beautiful and cloudy day and actually not all that crowded, so we slowly made our way past the ruins of the temples and palaces...

After the full afternoon, we headed back to meet up with Ben's parents for a drink before dinner at the Piazza Novona.

I loved all the painters...

For dinner, we headed to Armando al Pantheon, a classic, old restaurant serving up fantastic pasta and traditional italian.

It was a lovely first meal in Italy and with that we wandered back to the hotel and crashed for the night. We woke up the next morning early to get a quick run in before we left Rome. Our run was gorgeous. The streets were empty and we ran up to St. Peter's along the river and then circled back...

And that was my first taste of Rome - all in about 22 hours...next up Pietrasanta!