Rome: Day Two

Our second full day in Rome began with a visit to one of the buildings we'd been most excited to see: the Pantheon.

I remember visiting the Stourhead National Trust property during the pandemic, where you can find a miniature version of the Pantheon. Visiting it had felt like having a little holiday in Italy, which was especially nice during a period of time where it was difficult to travel abroad. But it definitely made me want to visit the real thing! 

It took close to 3 years, but we got there in the end!

The Pantheon is one of the most incredible buildings in Rome; it is now a church, but was once a Roman temple, built in the 2nd century. It's amazing that it's survived as long as it has, and also amazing that the Romans were able to build such a grand and beautiful building with its famous domed roof, using the technology of nearly 1000 years ago.

I'd been prepared for another long queue after the previous morning at the Vatican Museums. However, we were actually able to enter immediately with our prebooked tickets, and even the line to buy tickets wasn't that long.

The tickets actually only cost 5€ each, which is great value compared to other attractions in the city. And it was worth every penny - the building is just as wonderful to see from the inside as it is from the outside.

We also walked around the outside afterwards, in order to admire it from every angle.

Then we sat at a nearby café and had a Roman breakfast of hot chocolate and maritozzi. I'd started listening to the Voices of Bell'Italia podcast by Babbel while planning this trip, and remembered that the episode about Rome mentioned maritozzi - a type of brioche filled with cream - as a traditional Roman breakfast food. It was nice to put the recommendation from the podcast into action!

Our next stop of the morning was another iconic landmark of Rome: the Trevi Fountain. It was beautiful to see, but the crowds of tourists did ruin the effect slightly, so it wasn't the most memorable attraction for us.

Claudio, however, had discovered a good tip before we went: if you go up to the first floor of the Benetton shop opposite the fountain, you get an excellent view from the window!

The next iconic spot we visited was Piazza di Spagna, or the Spanish Steps. To be honest, it's nothing more than a picturesque church and a lot of steps, but the view from the top of the colourful buildings of the city actually beats the more classic view from below. 

We followed a nice, peaceful pathway above the city until we arrived at Piazza del Popolo, one of Rome's most famous squares.

At lunchtime, we opted for a pasta restaurant, unsurprisingly! I had penne arrabbiata, which was definitely one of my favourite meals of the entire trip, and which was spicy enough to clear my head a bit from the nasty cold I'd started the previous day.

We spent a large part of the afternoon in Villa Borghese, a beautiful park that feels very peaceful and far away from the noise and crowds of the city. Here you can find beautiful temples (they're not actually from Roman times, but are inspired by classical Roman and Greek architecture), a lake, and various other attractions. This is where we saw our first Roman cat, as well as some gorgeous little turtles!

Unfortunately, as my cold was at its worst that particular day, I was struggling with fatigue, and nearly fell asleep when we sat down on a bench in the park! So afterwards, we went back to the hotel for a siesta.

I found it very difficult to get up again in the evening, but also didn't want to waste an evening in the eternal city! So we went out for a little walk to go and see the pantheon by night (You can how rough I look in the picture!).

We also saw the Temple of Hadrian, another Ancient Roman landmark.

We finished off the evening with some more pasta - we'd walked a lot during the day, and this is Italy, after all!

Overall, it was a fantastic day of exploring, and yet there was still much more to come...

However, the next day, we left Rome and took a little day trip to the seaside, where we found beaches, a castle, and lots of cats!

A Seaside Day at Weston-super-Mare

It's amazing how having a couple of weeks away from blogging really makes me want to get writing again! It always reminds me of how this blog is my passion, and brings back the motivation to keep adding to this online travel journal, which I've been building up for more than half a decade now.

And today I've got another little trip to add to my collection. It's definitely not the most exciting one out of all the different places I've visited since starting this blog, but it was a fun day out!

My parents were visiting friends near Chippenham last Saturday, and they offered to drop me and Claudio off at the train station so that we could go off exploring somewhere. It didn't make sense to go to London or anywhere to the east or north from Chippenham, when it's quicker and cheaper to go from Swindon or Kemble, so we decided to go further into the South West. The two options that were reasonably interesting were Taunton (which has a museum inside a castle) and Weston-super-Mare (a seaside town that I went to a lot with my family as a toddler). Eventually, we opted for Weston-super-Mare, as it had been a long time since either of us had been to a beach.

The last time I went to a beach was in August, when I squeezed in a last visit to St George's Bay in Malta before coming back to the UK. (That is, unless you count Severn Beach as a beach, which to be honest, I don't!) Beaches are probably my favourite type of travel destination, so six months without visiting one felt like a long time! And although Weston-super-Mare is not exactly the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, there's something about seeing the sea, listening to the waves, and smelling the sea air that is really good for the soul, no matter how picturesque or not the beach itself is.

Having said that though, it was a little disappointing to arrive at the seafront of Weston-super-Mare, only to find something that didn't really look like sea at all! In photos we'd seen online (and in my memories of going there as a toddler!), it looked more like a "proper" beach, but what we found there looked more like an expanse of somewhat muddy sand with something that looked like it could be sea a long way off in the distance.

All the same, being at the seaside was a nice change of scenery! We decided to start off our sightseeing by visiting the Grand Pier, which costs £1 per person.

Most of the pier is taken up by the arcade, which has lots of different rides and games.

Near the far end of the pier, there's a corridor where you can see various examples of vintage travel posters advertising Weston-super-Mare. I've always loved these kinds of posters (I actually have one of Cannes!), and from a marketing perspective, it's amazing to see how they can make a place like Weston-super-Mare (which is pretty grey and muddy most of the time) look like a sunny paradise where glamorous movie stars go on holiday!

On the other side of the corridor, there's a large tearoom, which can actually be booked for weddings. It is a really nicely-decorated and spacious room, but it would be improved if it had a view of the sea rather than mud!

We also had a look out at the views from the pier, which were quite nice, despite the mud! I particularly liked the look of the island in the distance, which I believe is called Steep Holm. It looks kind of mysterious and exotic rising out of the water, and I like to imagine that it's hot and sunny over there, with tropical jungle and beautiful beaches!

Looking back towards the town itself from the pier, you can see the Winter Gardens Pavilion, an events venue, which is definitely the grandest and most beautiful building in the town.

Next we headed inland to visit the Italian Gardens behind the Pavilion. We had been quite excited to see these gardens based on their name, but in reality, they couldn't really be described as either "Italian" or "gardens" - it's just a big concrete square with some fountains and benches.

We then walked over to Knightstone Island, which is one of the most old-fashioned and pretty parts of Weston-super-Mare. The island is next to Marine Lake, where we found probably the closest thing to a normal beach that we saw all day, though it was a shame that the crane in the water ruined the view a bit!

Then we walked all the way down the seafront to the golf club, passing sights including Tropicana, an events venue with a bar (I wonder if drinks are free there!).

The far end of the beach is quite picturesque with its quaint wooden beach huts, and the sun had come out by this point, which made the place seem much more cheerful than before. We stopped here for a while and talked about life in general, and even came up with some exciting ideas as to our plans for the next year or two. Things haven't been coming together for us lately the way we hoped in terms of being able to properly set up our life together in a place we both want to be, and it's been getting us down at times, so it was definitely a positive thing to start to see another potential pathway ahead.

By this point, it was the middle of the afternoon, and we were very hungry! So we walked back up towards the town centre and found this cool round building, which has a Bistrot Pierre inside (a restaurant I used to go with my parents nearly every time they visited me when I was living in Nottingham).

The interior of the building is very elegantly decorated and has fantastic panoramic views of the beach. And the food was delicious!

For our dessert, we had Mr Whippy ice creams while walking along the sand, which was a great way to round off our day at the seaside!

Although Weston-super-Mare isn't the most beautiful beach in the world, we really enjoyed our day there, and it was a nice break from the stresses that we're going through at the moment. It was also interesting for Claudio to discover a typical British seaside town - he'd been to Brighton before, but not to a place like Weston-super-Mare, which is less wealthy and doesn't really get any foreign visitors. 

If all goes to plan, we'll be off to a more exotic beach very shortly, but our day in Weston-super-Mare definitely helped us get our beach fix for the time being!