All Roads Lead to Rome

A light rain had dampened the streets overnight as we packed up and called a taxi on this Sunday morning, our destination the Santa Moria Novella train station.  I reflected once again, as I had every time we took a taxi in Florence, that I was glad not to be driving.  The streets were crowded with pedestrians, bicycles, and cars, and our driver was very aggressive as he made his way through them all.  I would have meekly waited for the woman with a baby carriage to cross the street, for example, instead of tooting my horn and cutting her off.

The train station was chaotic, as we had expected it to be, one of the few things we had been anxious about on this trip.  But we discovered where our gate was (Martha had pre-purchased tickets) and figured out how the complicated signage worked, our train and track number climbing slowly up to the top until we heard it being announced in both Italian and English, and then had to hurry along as it began boarding in what seemed to be not enough time at all.

The high-speed trains here, as in all of Europe, are clean and comfortable, and we watched the scenery whizz by outside the windows at 155 miles per hour.  Interestingly, whenever the coach fell dark as we went through a tunnel, I could feel the pressure in my ears, exactly as one does when climbing or descending mountain roads in our part of the country.

The trip to Rome took just a little over an hour, and at the station we easily found a taxi to take us to our hotel, the Grand Hotel Tiberio, where we began to meet our travel companions in the lobby and elevator.  This group was from all over the world – Canada, Singapore, Australia – and we would come to know some of them well over the next two weeks.  We also met our tour director, Lino, who had a thick Italian accent that I sometimes struggled to understand.   

We boarded a coach and went on a brief sight-seeing tour of Rome, the “Eternal City,” stopping at the Basilica Santa Maria in Cosmedin, which dated to the Sixth Century.  There we viewed the relics of the famous saint of love, Valentine, and also saw the “Mouth of Truth.”  According to medieval legend the “mouth” will bite off the hand of any liar who places their hand in its mouth, and it was made famous in the movie Roman Holiday featuring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.  Yes, I still have both hands, and so does Martha.

The flower-crowned skull of Saint Valentine is in a side alcove, and we learned that he was a third-century Roman cleric martyred on February 14. 

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a pizzeria for a get together and a pizza dinner, where we began to get acquainted with some of the group, an interesting group of travelers, including a retired Air Force pilot who had flown fighter jets, and two women from Saskatchewan who had met while cold-water diving and whose husbands did not like to travel.  One of the pleasures of travel is not just seeing new places but meeting new people.`