3-6 May 2025
For our 10th anniversary, Hampton and I decided to break out of our COVID rut and Travel again. Travel with a capital T. See All The Things. …of course, we were soon totally overwhelmed with planning. Enter Adam’s Travel Designs. We had never used a travel agent before but given how out of the game we were — like not thinking about France being a pre-Olympics mess — it was a great way to ease back into living our best internationally jet setting lives.
With Adam’s help, we decided to revisit our honeymoon haunts, with some additions. I’ll be doing four different posts for the four cities we stayed in and organizing all the Instastories into coordinating highlights. First up: Rome!
Fun fact: I turned on airplane mode before this story uploaded so you’re seeing it before Instagram. Congrats!
We flew overnight and proceeded to drop our bags and head out for brunch.
Hampton found Hotel Oceania for our honeymoon and while it may not be the most glamorous of hotels, the location is fantastic, the charm and customer service can’t be beat, and unless someone sponsors us, we will never stay anywhere else in Rome.
Our first night in town, we ran into an angry liberal from Texas at a nearby bar. After some commiserating, we took our leave and picked up a bottle of wine at a nearby market to drink on the internal courtyard balcony that is one of our favorite parts of the Oceania. As we were enjoying the night air, guess who got off the elevator. I don’t even know how many hotels are in those few blocks to do the math on those odds but there you go.
Since we had been here before, our only real goal in the city was to head back to the place we had previously visited two nights in a row for their octopus dish. Welp, Babbo’s changed their menu. But we still had an absolutely fantastic polpo e patate. And we have to figure out how to do this ridiculously creamy mash we had a few places.
And then went back the next night for the whole fish dish the table beside us ordered.
The rest of the time in Rome, we just wandered. Our one full day there, we did over 25,000 steps! You can go down basically any street in Rome and run into something interesting to look at — hence “Casual Ruins”. Our first afternoon, we happened upon a changing of the guard ceremony as the Italian president was apparently onsite; the next day when we walked by the same official residence, the guards were standing differently and with different weapons, which we questioned until we realized one of the flags was missing.
The first Sunday in May, all state-sponsored attractions are free to the public. We weren’t planning to do the Coliseum and Palatine Hill again, but then I read a blog post about how to skip the Coliseum line so we thought why not. Well, that blog needs to be updated because that hot tip did not work. We weren’t sad since, again, we were planning to skip those places, but FYI in case you are going to Rome on the first Sunday of a month.
Related: there are a lot of blogs out there that need to be updated. We tried to find a few “hidden gems”, but they were all either less than hidden and packed or not open at that time or non-existent. My biggest travelling pro-tip hot take is to make reservations for any of your Must Do’s and just leave the rest to fate and enjoy the experience. Luckily, I am also married to someone who is content to wander. Especially in Italy where you can almost always stop into a market to grab a “walkin’ beer” (Ed. note — that’s a Hampton phrase, not an actual Italian one.)
As we meandered from the Forumy part of town on our way to Trastevere, along the Circus Maximus, we stumbled upon the Library of the Kitchen which yes, please. Apparently we missed the museum part, but to see the first published cookbook and also to learn about propaganda around Mussolini-era and WWII cooking [e.g. sanctioned to heck, work with what you got] was very neat.
Trastevere is a neighborhood just across the Tiber. While it’s allegedly best known for its evening energy, we managed to catch its Sunday flea market — which other blog posts totally downplayed. This thing was massive. Sadly, we only found its more vintage-focused second street on the way out as things were closing… but also, we were traveling with just backpacks soooo that was probably for the best.
The restaurant we chose for lunch had wandering musicians. As if I didn’t already want to crawl under the table when they came to stand beside us, Hampton then requested what is probably the “Freebird” of Italy and I almost died.
While in the neighborhood, we visited the Museo de Roma Trastevere, because the main Museo de Roma is something we missed a decade ago and because we just happened to pass this one. We got there for the closing day of an exhibit about Hilde Lotz-Bauer, a German photographer who lived in Italy from the mid-1930s. Lots to unpack there. And while we were checking it out — there was a random musical event. Our Italian isn’t good enough to know *why* there was this random music, but it was yet another wonderfully random experience.
From Rome, it was on to Naples. While Adam would have been happy to book us transportation, we decided to do it on our own, and once we finally decided on timing, it was very easy to book reserved train seat tickets and find the right track. Smartphones with international data plans made this Italian tour a lot different than the last! See you in Napoli.
Ann Davis-Rowe 