April 25 - Rome

For our last full day of sightseeing in Rome, Lyle and I decided to do the hop-on hop-off bus tour around the city. In actual fact, we ended up doing this tour two and three quarter times. On the first circuit, the bus took a short cut avoiding the Vatican area. We learned the reason for this later on. When Pope Francis had celebrated Mass that morning in St. Peter’s Square, there were around 100,000 people milling about.

Because our bus tickets were good for twelve hours, we took the bus for a second time in the afternoon. This time the bus travelled the full circuit and the crowds had lessened. Later on still when we had been walking on our own through the streets of Rome, we were glad to come across a Red Bus Line stop and hopped on the first bus that took us back to the area of our hotel.

As all this touring around in the bus took up most of the day, Lyle and I certainly felt that we got our money’s worth from the cost of a single ticket. Yes, that’s right, a single ticket. When we joined the queue for the initial trip, there were two ticket sellers on the sidewalk. The first young man sold us two adult tickets. When we came to the front of the line, the second seller noticed my bianco di canna . He pointed to it and exclaimed, “disabled!” Lyle recognized what he was saying and explained that I couldn’t see. When this was too many English words at one time, Lyle then said that I was blind. The young man became even more excited, pointed at me and again verbalized disable, and made the first ticket seller refund us the price of my ticket.

“You disabled,” he exclaimed again. “You are free.” While I didn’t really like being labelled disabled, I was quite happy to ride for free.

Much later in the afternoon, Lyle and I decided to walk to the famous Trevi Fountain. Lyle had googled the route and we had a map. Nevertheless, roads in Rome do not run at ninety-degree angles and we had only walked for about five minutes before both directions and map became impossible to follow. Lyle navigated us through by following the sun. I was amazed by his ingenuity and so proud of his skill in getting us to this famous Roman landmark. Of course, we soon discovered that on that afternoon, there were about five or six hundred other tourists who had also made their way to the same spot.

Following are three pictures. The first shows me sitting on the wet fountain edge about to toss in my coin for a wish. The second shows a small section of the crowd gathered in the piazza. The third is a picture of Trevi Fountain itself.

Me at Trevi Fountain's edge

Crowd at Trevi Fountain

Trevi Fountain

So, that is it for our Italian holiday. One more interesting note though. When Lyle googled to find the Italian words for white cane, my blog site also came up on the screen as part of the search. Thanks to everyone for following us on our journey.

Arriverderci Roma and Ciao.