We decided to take a special trip for our 60th birthdays! We weren’t sure what to do but we signed up for a Robert St. John Italy trip. We were waitlisted but once we got in, we planned to do 5 days in Rome before! We started gathering info and booked our trip! Neither of us have ever been to Italy or Europe!

We stayed at The Tribune https://www.hyatt.com/en-US/hotel/italy/the-tribune/romjd. It was really nice. They offer a fabulous breakfast! The front desk was very helpful in getting taxis, making plans, and getting us change for Euros. It is a contemporary boutique hotel. You could walk to Spanish steps, etc.

Below is the first day pics… We used “withlocals” WithLocals app to plan first day. We planned a walking kickstart city tour of Rome. It was a 1 1/2 hours and perfect, then we took a 4 hour nap. Manuela was our guide and very knowledgeable! We walked 15,516 steps!

Second day of Rome started VERY early. We had to meet our guide for the Pristine Sistine skip the line tour at 7 am! The Vatican has about 20,000 visitors a day. The Vatican is its own country. It is huge and has the most amazing collections of the Catholic Church and Popes for centuries. The Vatican Museums (54 of them) date back to 1506 and collections have grown with each Pope. Many many famous artist have contributed to the museums collection. Around 600-800 people live on the Vatican property who work there. There are 2,500 employees. We used ‘walks of Italy’ to book this and highly recommend! Steps 🚶‍♀️🚶🏽10,400

3rd day of Rome! Skip the line Colosseum/Forum tour (3 hours) First of all – bomb threat so we had to wait extra 30 minutes before entering! Lots of crazy things we learned about the Colosseum. One thing I was fascinated by was besides all the gladiator type fighting they also used prisoners to fight. It was a day long event back in the day. We also bought separately a “tour” of Mamertine Prison which we did afterwards. It’s not a tour but you go down deep under a building to see where Peter and Paul were imprisoned. It takes 5 minutes but very moving!

We went to San Pietro in Vincoli and saw the Michaelangelo statue of Moses. Step count 15,645 😥

4th day in Rome! We went to church at St. Andrews of Scotland .. it was definitely different than we’re used to but very small townish and interesting.

Piccolo Buco (🍕!) is where we had lunch. This is a delicious hole in the wall pizza place. It’s a small family-run operation and worth the wait. Get there at 11:45 to get in right at noon or wait in the line .. could take up to 45 minutes. Afterwards we walked back to Trevi Fountain and got some more gelato! Our big tour of the day was the Borghese Gallery. It is stunning especially for any art lovers and has one of the best Art Collections. It was collected by Cardinal Borghese in 17th century. We used the “walks of Italy” tour people again and enjoyed our tour. It sits in heart of Rome and is a beautiful park! The villa and estate established in 1600s and made into a museum in 1902. That night we headed to Trastereve and had dinner at Toonstello. Highly recommend..wait in line. It goes fast. Steps 13,010!

Steps 13010

On Monday we took the high speed train to Florence and met up with our RSJ group for Florence/Tuscany ! 🚊 Ciao!