Buongiorno Italia!

Day 1 (4 May 2025)

Travel hasn't been on my itinerary for 6 years. First there was the COVID outbreak, then I went through a  tumultuous period of family events the years after. So this trip to Italy is quite momentous - Andre and I felt we deserved a celebratory break plus it's his graduation trip (and he secured his dream job which will be waiting for him when he returns!) 

Incidentally, the day before we left (4 May) was polling day in Singapore. There's no way we could have predicted this when we booked the tickets last year. It allowed us to vote before we embarked on our holiday so we wouldn't be struck off the register. God is so good.

I decided this occasion was worth splurging on so I bought business class tickets on Qatar and it's so luxe it's alien to us, we were gushing over everything! We didn't have to queue in lines for anything, we could sleep flat in our own pods and the food was spectacular (lobster! 😲) Although I have to say, I'm not used to being so attended to, I felt quite paiseh when the flight attendant came to make up the mattress 😅

 

We reached Rome at About 2pm and were out of the airport in less than an hour. Taxis into the city are a fixed rate of €55. We're already learning that cabs aren't cheap here.

 

The drive to our hotel felt surreal. One minute we're seeing regular old buildings, another minute we're passing the city's ancient walls and the Colosseum. It's one thing to have buildings that are hundreds of years old but another to have architecture from BC and early AD period. Rome was an empire until 476 AD and it boggles my mind to think that some of these roads and buildings existed when Jesus was alive! 

 

We checked into our hotel Parlamento Boutique Hotel which I chose because it's close to all the main attractions. The room is small and basic but in comparison, the bathroom is huge (we discovered it's the same throughout Italy cos they always have a bidet in their bathrooms).

We walked to the iconic Trevi Fountain near our hotel and I can't even describe how mad amazing it is. I've seen pictures of it but you can't experience the scale except in person. I kept saying, "They call this a fountain??" It was built in the 18th century and is almost 50m wide. It's one of the aqueducts of Rome that supplied drinking water to the city.

The Romans had aqueducts as far back as more than 2,000 years ago and even today, you can still drink from their cisterns that are available everywhere in the city. The water tastes wonderfully refreshing. There's an app you can download which shows you where all the fountains are and Andre and I even made a note of which ones had better tasting water! Here I am fill my bottle from one. 

 

Our first dinner in Italy was at a little pizzeria nearby (cars drove right behind where we were sitting on a one-lane road). Those pizzas were stupendous! Delicious crust and one of them had the crispiest porchetta ever. We're going to get so fat 😋