I suspect I will ponder Italy a lot this week. There were a lot of sights, sensations and experiences to process. If I had to come up with a hierarchy  of words that might sum up our experience. Contradictions, Amazement, Luxury and Beauty would all be at the top of the list. Rome gave us hotel luxury. When in Rome stay at The Hoxton. Surely the most comfy of communal areas with fascinating books to browse, while our feet recovered from our twenty thousand tourist steps.

With dedication and the Citymapper App we criss-crossed Rome and caught sight of many of the traditional bucket- list tourist spots. I use the words caught sight because the historic locations in Rome are all  being treated to renovation work. So without queueing in the long queues for each individual location it is very hard to see anything as there are just miles of 7 foot high wooden hoardings circling the perimeter of  every famous site. So I would say we glimpsed Roman antiquities from a distance, from the perspective of the many hills that we traversed. An evening trip to the Vatican City was not something we planned but when in Rome why not.

Spotlessly clean and very white, almost sterile with no fuzzy warm feeling of centuries of humanity coming together for worship. Curiously the feeling was more of a banking global HQ.With a rather fancy doorman. We did find a warm fuzzy feeling in a nearby cafe. Simple good food, great wine and a somewhat idiosyncratic decor of framed Disney jigsaw puzzles and many photos of the Pope kissing small children.

All the carb we could possibly need to fuel our walk home. Which took in a detour to the Trevi Fountain.

Which in turn required a few more calories. The Trevi fountain is fabulous in unexpected ways. The building and the fountain both morph out of the same mishapen and craggy marble boulders. All that skill!!!

I think this blog is a summation of our Rome disappointments, but for every disappointment there werealso hugely interesting unplanned events.

Just one more disappointment to get out into the open. A Contemporary Art Collection that was mind- blowingly empty of art and pretentiously full of arty-farty bollocks. But if that was a big low point it led us by way of a scruffy poster to tomorrows blog, a real unexpected treat.