Italy - Rome, Florence, Bologna, San Marino and Venice

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Heading straight from the St. Peter's Square will lead you to Castel Sant Angelo. A castle once was the residence of the Pope.

From there you can oversee the Basilica de San Pietro. Now it is just an old building.

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Castel Sant Angelo's entrance is facing Tiber river. The Ponte Sant Angelo connects the east side of Rome. We walked through the bridge to our next spot, Piazza Navona. On the way we go to Piazza, we passed by a gelato shop which the chef was showing his skill on making gelato.

In this trip, we tasted a lot of different gelato, will show you the shops and stories later.

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Piazza Navona is a crowded place. People go there to see the Fontana dei Fiumi, a work of Bernini. This is a fountain using 4 different sculptures to represent four different rivers from different continents, and an obelisk stands in the middle. The four rivers are the Nile representing Africa, the Danube representing Europe, the Ganges representing Asia, and the Río de la Plata representing the Americas.

Can you identify which is which?

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After that, we walked to Patheon. On the way we visited a cafe shop. The cuppuccino of this cafe is rated the best one in Rome. We bought some coffee beans too.

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Pantheon, long queue again because there was just a ritual running. The ceiling is big and beautiful. This place also has a number of tomb for the national heroes. The last one is the tomb of Raphael.

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Only 5 minute walk you can go to Fontana di Trevi. We went to visit a gelato shop which has over 150 different flavours. We also went to another cafe famous in espresso.

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Fontana di Trevi, we had been here in 2006. If you throw a coin into the fountain, your next trip to Rome will be guaranteed. We dare not to do it again as we do not expect we will visit again in near future.

There is a gelato shop next to the Fontana. Nothing special indeed, we took a picture of it just because we visited this shop in 2006. 

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We had dinner somewhere close to Fontana di Trevi. Time was in the evening and guess what, we decided to go to hotel on foot. We did a lot of walking in Rome because somehow it was quite difficult to utilize the public transport. Each spots is within walking distance, and generally you will spend almost the same length of time by public transport or on foot.

We walked a few hundreds meter from Fontana di Trevi and arrived at Altare della Patria (the so-called white cake). Then another a few hundred meter we would be at the Roman Forum, another hundred meter or so to Colosseo, then about 10 minute walk to hotel.

The night views of Roman Forum and Colosseo are a bit creepy......actually.

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Basilica Papale di Santa Maria Maggiore day and night.

We went back to hotel, passing by this church. This is the biggest church in Rome (except Vatican). The church was close at night and we decided to visit it tomorrow morning.

The next day we went there early but they had a ritual doing. A large group of visitors and pilgrims were waiting to enter.

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It was interesting that after they did the ritual at the entrance of the church, they continued the ritual inside and at the same time, allowed the visitor to enter the church. The church is huge and beautiful.

I found that they can provide counselling services with different languages.