June 30 - The Last Day of our Roman Sojourn

Who would have guessed that our little stay in Rome would actually come to an end.  We always feel like we have forever and then, before you know it, we're packing up!  Today, Jack snuck out while everyone was sleeping and completed his run of Rome's 7 hills!  Congratulations!  A big pasta meal was in order after that so we tramed it to the city center for lunch at Pizzaria Emma.  They absolutely rock the thin crust Roman-style pizza and the spaghettoni carbonara was the best I'd ever had - yummy fried pig cheeks!   We tried a new gelateria close by and took our treats to a park just around the corner.  It lacked charm but it had a nasoni and the girls had a fun time spraying each other with the water (until Natalie slipped and fell in).  

On our last evening out, we walked along the Tiber River to enjoy the Lungo il Tevere Roma - a 'festival' that runs all summer long and consists of a couple of miles of temporary stalls transformed into bars, restaurants, games and shops along the Tiber River.  We started with an aperitivo then walked the length of it, taking it all in.  Everyone was too baked to keep our 9:00 pm dinner reservation so we went home and grabbed take-out pizza from our neighborhood pizzaria.  Natalie was so tired, her eyes kept rolling back in her head at the dinner table!  Two stories later and she was out like a light!  

Tomorrow, we pick up our rental car and drive to Forte dei Marmi - the seaside town that promises sandy beaches, aquamarine waters and a well-earned break from the blistering pace we've been keeping in Rome!  I think everyone is ready!

June 29th - Pompeii & Naples / Hydromania

Both Jacqui and Charlotte have heard or read about the ancient city of Pompeii and how it met it's dramatic demise and so Jack decided to take them on the bullet train to Naples and then on to Pompeii on a local train.  The ruins are very well excavated and preserved and the museum in Naples has a huge exhibit of artifacts.

We knew that Natalie would get nothing out of this little side trip so I stayed home with her and took her to go swimming at Hydromania - Rome's waterpark!  It was a strange cross between Sunlight Pools in Cincinnati (lots of screaming children and overweight parents) and the pool scene at The Cosmopolitan in Vegas (lots of loud dance music and bikini-clad millennials shaking their groove things in the pool).  What a mixture!  Natalie had a blast and I felt good to have done something that was fun just for her.  In the opening line of the kid's chapter of Rick Steves' guidebook for Rome he writes "Rome doesn't have a lot to offer young children".  After spending almost 3 weeks here, I can attest to that!  That said, later in that chapter, Rick Steves also wrote: "Our family traveled to Europe when I was a kid, during my “wonder years” — when travel experiences fed and shaped my core values about the world and my place in it.  Getting your children comfortable in the wider world is great parenting." I genuinely hope that he's got that right too!

The Pompeii / Naples crowd had a fun but exhausting day.  The temperatures have been quite manageable for our whole stay in Rome - surprisingly so.  Today though, the temperatures soared into the 90's and, if you weren't at a water park, you were gonna feel it.  Once they'd visited the ruins and the museum, they stopped at a much reviewed pizza restaurant for the best pizza ever!!  Naples is the birthplace of pizza and they do it up right!

June 28 - Geocaching, Picnic lunch in Doria Pamphilj and Modern Art and Dinner in Testaccio

The girls started off this morning by staging a play for us.  I won't even begin to intimate that it is all sunshine and roses between the 3 of them but this morning was very cute.  I can't even quite piece together what the play was actually about - perhaps part fashion show, part modern dance.  Since it's Sunday and everything is closed, we decided to stay local and have a picnic at the Doria Pamphilj park.  To make the walk a little more interesting and a little less of a whine-fest, we decided to geocache along the way.  Wikipedia describes Geocaching as "an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a GPS receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world."  Sounds weird but it's really fun and the girls were soooo into it.  We found 2 geocaches and put our names in the log.  We plopped down on a blanket at the edge of the playground in the park and enjoyed our picnic lunch and a glass of wine while the kids ricocheted back and forth between us and the play structures.  We went back home and cooled off before heading back to the Testaccio neighborhood to visit a satellite of the MACRO modern art museum.  This one only had Josh Smith paintings which Charlotte promptly labeled 'scribble scrabbles'.  That neatly summed up the feelings of the group.  We walked to Flavio al Velavevodetto for dinner and the girls made me proud.  There was a table of Romans behind us and their children were screaming and making a ruckus.  Amazingly, our little ladies were well behaved and quiet.  It was refreshing change to not be the mom looking around to all the other tables with apologies in my eyes.  Tonight, that was someone else's job!

We went back home and cooled off before heading back to the Testaccio neighborhood to visit a satellite of the MACRO modern art museum.  This one only had Josh Smith paintings which Charlotte promptly labeled 'scribble scrabbles'.  That neatly summed up the feelings of the group.  We walked to Flavio al Velavevodetto for dinner and the girls made me proud.  There was a table of Romans behind us and their children were screaming and making a ruckus.  Amazingly, our little ladies were well behaved and quiet.  It was refreshing change to not be the mom looking around to all the other tables with apologies in my eyes.  Tonight, that was someone else's job!

June 27 - Sistine Chapel, Aperitivo & dinner in Monti

Knowing that Natalie would get nothing out of being schlepped through the Vatican museum to see the Sistine Chapel, Jack took the older two alone.  Natalie and I hopped a cab and went back to the only 'museo e bambino' that we've found in all of Rome.  The Explora museum!! She was very offended when we split from daddy and the girls but was absolutely gleeful when we arrived at Explora.  The Vatican crowd had a good time - thanks to the kid-centered audio guide and the promise of gelacho.  While looking for an exit, they stumbled on an underground exhibit room containing all the pope-mobiles through the ages!  Fun!

  

We reconvened back at home and gratefully escaped for date night - back to the hipster Monti neighborhood.  We opted for public transit and it took an hour to go 2 miles!  We were not prepared to give up our aperitivo for that bit of bad luck so we cancelled our 8:00 dinner rez and sat down for a snack and cocktail in the lively Piazza Della Madonna dei Monte.  I'm getting used to the bitterness of the classically Italian cocktail -- the Aperol Spritz -- and I love the salty nibbles with which it is served.  The people watching in this open air bar / hangout was unparalleled!  Check out the picture of the guy in the sandals - only a young and handsome Italian hipster could pull those off!!  And even then ...

Next stop was the Palazzo delle Exposizioni featuring a comprhensive exhibition of American pop artist David Lachapelle's hyper-realistic photographs.  The experience was unsettling in a way.  The juxtaposition between the heat and sensory overload of the daytime in Rome and the cool, white silence of the museum was jarring, made even more so by the startling nature of the artwork itself.  We left the museum at closing time (10:30 pm!) and walked through the cool, sepia-toned, evening streets of Rome to our restaurant. By some magic, the graffiti and grime that is so exhausting during the day, fades into a tranquil veneer at night and you're left with a feeling of otherworldliness that is difficult to describe but utterly enchanting!  

Our dinner at Urbane 47 was a welcome break from classic Roman cuisine and we topped it off with gelato at our old favorite, Fatamorgana.  This is our second Saturday night at this lively gelato joint and the people watching at the Piazza degli Zingari is the best!  I'll take this over watching hawkers selling selfie sticks at Trevi Fountain any day!

Ps - Charlotte lost a tooth yesterday and we learned this morning that the tooth fairies here bring Euros!!