Friday 7 May

A deliberately planned short stage today, firstly so that we had time to navigate ourselves into Rome, and hopefully so we'd have enough time to get out into the city and find our bearings.

The rain had stopped at last and we packed up and threw out. A campsite resident made us some great espressos to wake us up, and I think he wanted us to stay for more (2 weeks in Italy and still my Italian is not great!).

The road to Rome was uneventful, mostly downhill and mostly with a tailwind. We hit heavy traffic when we hit the city proper, and somehow we managed to find our b&b in Colina Fleming (in the North of the city, which helped a lot, since that was the direction we were approaching from) fairly easily. The b&b was simply a flat with a spare room. The owner, Daniela, was a journalist.

We had some lunch at a nearby restaurant and caught the bus into the city where we did a general wonder-around. It started raining again and magically lots of people suddenly appeared selling umbrellas... for 20eur each!! We negotiated one of the vendors down to 10eur. We had pizza and wine for supper and headed back to the b&b.