Rome Overview

Di Yin and I spent three full days in Rome, leaving for Italy on Friday, November 26, 2010, and returning on Tuesday, November 30. I liked the trip and the city. Below I summarize my impressions of the city. I often found myself mentally comparing it to Barcelona, but I think that's because it's the only other mainland European city where I spent any substantial amount of time in recent memory. In the discussion below, I'll attempt to explain my impression of Rome on its own terms, not in reference to this artificial comparison point.

Food
First up, the food. I enjoyed all the food: pastas, pizzas, meat dishes (secondi piatti), and gelatos. Even those restaurants that weren't uniformly tasty had at least one dish that was better than simply good, i.e., something remarkably good and certainly better than most versions I've had. Also, in particular, the Romans know how to do sauces such as tomato sauces or wine sauces. Yes, even simple tomato sauce is better in Rome. In addition, I like how the dishes are balanced. Roman chefs know moderation: for instance, in pasta dishes with meats, cream sauces, etc., they don't use too much meat or cream, thus keeping the dish light.

Incidentally, restaurant menus list whether the fish or, often, the vegetables were previously frozen. :)

Getting Around / The Feel of the City
I liked walking along the cobblestone streets and through the scattered piazzas in Rome's large historic sections (just as I enjoyed doing the same in Barcelona). They're atmospheric and, with fewer cars than the rest of the city, nice for strolling. Best yet, the older section of the city is large; it would take at least fifty minutes to walk a straight line across at its widest point. And who walks straight lines in parts of town like this anyway?

Outside this area, there are still many interesting sites (more on that later), but walking was harder: outside the (mostly pedestrianized) medieval section, the streets, all wide enough to have two (or more) lanes, are in use. If you as a pedestrian are at a crosswalk and have the walk signal, the cars keep coming. They don't stop as in California and wait for you to cross the street. You must be fearless and begin crossing at a measured, predictable pace and trust the cars will stop for you. They do. Nevertheless, despite this negative, because there are things to see throughout the city and because we quickly adopted to the crossing customs, we often chose to walk rather than take public transit.

The only form of public transit we took was the metro. It was efficient, but as there are only two lines, it doesn't go everywhere you want to go. In particular, it doesn't go to the medieval part of the city--what I think of as the nicest section--and consequently if you're there and tired of walking, you must take something else (bus, taxi, etc.) or stop to sit for a while. By the way, the metro trains are fine but the stations need polish: they require long underground walks through tunnels that feel like they're still under construction.

Sites
There are old buildings everywhere in Rome, not just in the cobblestoned medieval/Renaissance section. Rome's architecture is the highlight of this trip for me. When I first wrote the previous sentence, I tried following it up with "especially" and then listing some sites I particularly remembered, but I found my list growing to cover pretty much all the famous sites we visited. I decided not to bother listing them here.

It's neat walking around and stumbling upon old buildings, whether from the Italian Renaissance or old Roman ones dating back from around the time of Christ. Colonnaded buildings, fancy churches, ancient temples (sometimes adopted by Christianity and rebranded as a church), old ruins, and historic city walls abound. And it's not just the large structures that make Rome so absorbing but also the flourishes: the odd fresco on the side of a building, the statues in piazzas, the reliefs on street corners and on eaves. I was particularly fascinated by seeing how old structures get incorporated into new, such as how a segment of a Roman wall became part of a building's wall or how the corner of an older flat-stone building got reused as the corner of a not-quite-as-old brick building.

With the Vatican making Rome the center of the Catholic world, churches in particular are omnipresent. Imagine a checkerboard overlaid onto a grid of streets and you'll be an idea of how common they are. Sometimes a church's exterior belies the quality of its interior; sometimes it does not.

Incidentally, I was amused to see lots of hotels, again a higher density than in other cities I've visited. At first I thought this might just have been the section of the city I was in, but no--they're everywhere (though nevertheless not as common as churches).

Language
Language was not a problem. Rome seems to be a tourist-oriented city; most of the people with whom we interacted (hotel clerks, restaurant waiters, and museum staff) all spoke English (or at least enough to communicate easily with us).

Shopping
Rome seems to be a fashion hot-spot. People dress well. We saw a great many clothing shops/boutiques, a higher density than I remember seeing in any other city. Relatedly, Di Yin, who's certainly been shopping in Manhattan, was impressed with the beauty of the shoes for sale.

Costs
Hotels and food are expensive. I can't speak to much else. The clothing covered a wide range, though it tended toward what I would call expensive. The only form of local public transit I took, the metro, was cheap.

Neat Observations

• While Euro notes are identical from country to country, Euro coins differ. Here are pictures of the different two-euro coins; use the navigational bar on the left of that page to view other denominations in various countries.
• There are sometimes pedals in the floor of bathrooms that, when pressed, turn the faucet on (with pressure corresponding to how hard they're pressed). There is no handle on the faucet itself. In addition to providing the benefit of not having to touch the faucet after washing your hands (to turn it off), this mechanism also ensures that faucets cannot be left running unintentionally.
• People here smoke as much (not more) as those in London, but they smoke unfiltered cigarettes so it smells more.
• A number of statues throughout the city have wolves in them (certainly a reference to Romulus and Remus).
• There are many always-on drinking fountains everywhere.
• Rome's postcards are more advanced, more sophisticated, than those in other countries I've visited. I saw two types of postcards that I'd never seen before: panoramic postcards and archaeology postcards. Panoramic postcards are postcards that fold out to 1.5 feet long, yielding a full panorama of a place. Archaeology postcards look like regular greeting cards with some parts of the cover cut-out. Inside the card is an image of what the archaeological site (e.g., the Colosseum) looks like now. If you look at the cover, you see a rendition of the site in its heyday, with the cut-out portions (showing the card's inside) revealing parts of the ruins that remain in roughly their original appearance. These cards put the existing ruins into context. Sadly, I didn't allocate time to shop for/select any postcards of either type, but I'm nevertheless impressed with the designs' ingenuity.