11 days in Rome with your family
After our really nice stay in Ponsacco, http://www.topiwalla.com/2017/12/11-days-ponsacco-children/, we travelled further south, in search of a warmer place to stay, to Rome. We searched and searched and could not find a suitable apartment that fit our budget on AirBNB. We finally found one in another similar site, VRBO. VRBO was a little confusing at first as prices were in USD whereas AirBNB had the option for us to convert prices to SGD. Anyway, we found a great place and started our drive there from Ponsacco.
The drive to Rome could have been done via the coastal route or the shorter route which was further in to the mainland. We decided to take the shorter route and took a total of 4 hours to reach Rome. That is mainly because we took a slower drive than google’s top speed 🙂
Rome, on first impression, looks a little more ghetto and unrefined when compared to the other cities we were in earlier. The people were parking on pedestrian pathways, there was much more trash, including dog shit, around everywhere on the streets. Another alot more obvious thing were the street sellers and caravans that were everywhere. Of course, this was expected, as Rome was much more a tourist destination when compared to Piacenza or Ponsacco 🙂
We had a bit of a difficulty finding parking near the place we leased and we eventually found a parking that was a little far away. Also, because we reached the apartment relatively late, we unloaded what we needed and headed to the apartment. The house itself was wonderful. It had 3 bedrooms, one of which was occupied by the landlord, Giovanni, and the other 2 were available to us. However, we ended up using only 1 of the 2 rooms as the other room was deeper into the apartment and the first room gave us that “own home” feel. The apartment also had a central heating, just like the 2 apartments before, however, the heating would turn off at 11am and resume only at 6am.This was not ideal for me as I was getting up, at times at 4 or 5 in the morning to get on calls with people in Singapore. Wearing a blanket and a fleece jacket worked for me though.
Rome will be our last stop in Italy and the stay in Rome is planned to be about a week long before we head off to Paris via what I rate to be the worst airline on earth, RyanAir.
The place, unfortunately, is no longer listed on VRBO and we were probably amongst the last guests in Giovanni’s wonderful apartment. He was mentioning to us that he would be leasing out the place to a long term tenant so there is no point trying to contact him for the place.
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