August 2006 - Rome, Italy - Day 4

In what has become our travel uniform - still no luggage from Iberia (boycott!) - we get an early start at exploring our new neighborhood. We began our day with authentic roman pastries and caffe lattes for breakfast at the quaint Antica Cafeteria across from our apartment in Trastevere. We love to watch the older romans linger for hours at a table with a small tazza di caffe as they talk to each other and passerbys. We took a long walk stopping to snack on fresh fruit and italian ice at Campo de Fiori's open air market.

This is also a great spot to shop for spices from all over the world.

Next we walked through the high end shopping district on Corso Vittorio Emanuelle up and around the monument to the beautiful and trendy neighborhood of Monti located just north of the Colosseum (via Urbana is our favorite street in the area). We stopped to see the magnificent church Santa Maria di Maggiore. We continued east walking by the park at Piazza Vittorio and discovering a huge shopping mall at the Termini train station. Too tired to continue walking, we hopped in a cab and let him drive us home the long way circling nearly every major site for only nine euro. In an attempt to avoid getting sick of italian food, we had dinner at Planet Kebab - the 24-hour falafel house on our block (truly a novelty in Rome and quite yummy).