February 2018: Rome Summary

Highlights

• Hotel room was fantastic. Great location. Nice and big. Lots of character
• Best… Gelato… Evah…
• Vatican, Colosseum, and Pantheon
• Pizza and gelato tour
• Tomatico loved the food!

Lowlights

• Connecting flights. Zurich is not the most exciting airport to be stuck for an extended period
• Needed to take tours to really understand the significance of most sites
• The pizza
• Weather partially rained out a majority of the days

Wins

• Despite long layover, the flight was pretty cheap
• Access to lounges made layover manageable
• A whole new perspective on what is considered “old”
• Getting local advice from my wife’s co-worked on airport transport
• Bus was cheap, easy and convenient. Busy during rush hours but fine otherwise
• No touristy crowds to deal with

Takeaways

We had a good time on the trip. The weather did make the last few days less enjoyable, but I guess that’s what we get for going in the middle of the winter. A few days after we left there was a snow storm that crippled the city for days until it melted. We missed seeing the Colosseum under a coating of snow!

While we enjoyed our time there, I didn’t fall in love with the city and personally don’t have much desire to go back any time soon. While I love history, the ruins and ancient artifacts just didn’t excite me as much as I had hoped. Tomatico would love to go back just for the food, though. In the end we may have been better off trying to add another day to the trip and have 4 days in Rome and 4 days in another city.

I do have to say that the city and culture is VERY family friendly. We felt safe the entire time and between English and Spanish we could communicate with most people at a basic level. There were of course MANY people that did know English.

To get the most out of Rome you really need to have a tour guide. Otherwise, unless you’re already an expert, you’ll have no idea the importance or history of what you are looking at.

While we’ll definitely remember the gelato, the pizza was mostly forgettable. In fact when we got back, the next day the kids wanted to go get pizza.

We spend a week in Rome and they craved a good pizza when they get back. I’m sure we just had bad luck that we had such difficulty finding good pizza in Rome, but I thought it was a bit ironic we had to wait until we got home to find it.

With our experience on this trip and in 2017 when we went to Paris at the same time of year, we didn’t have the best weather. We’d still recommend this as a good time to go to Europe, though. Being from Boston we may view European winter weather as less of an obstacle because the weather is in most cases going to be better than what it is at home. My wife has spent considerable time in Europe in the summer and it can be hot, crowded and fairly miserable in places. While it was cool and rainy in our experience, the lack of crowds and the significantly cheaper flights and hotel rooms make up for a lot.