First Outing in a Long Time

Steve and I are in Rome. It's been a long time since we last ventured outside of the U.S.--very nearly three years. Same reasons that a lot of people haven't ventured far, quite possibly including you, dear reader. We've now had our bivalent Covid vaccination, covering Omicron variants as well as the original strain and its variants, and we're feeling moderately confident that during our travels we won't get Covid if we wear masks much of the time and spend much time outdoors. Also, if we do get Covid, at this relatively late stage in this particular pandemic, it is not very likely to make us seriously ill. (Even though we are by some standards old.)

This time we’re away from home for nearly a month, the first week having been to see family on the East coast, also putting us in position for a somewhat reduced amount of jet lag when we moved on to three weeks in Rome.

The goals of this trip are very limited and therefore attainable. They are: to walk a lot; to eat well, which has a way of also becoming a lot; and to sleep a lot.

The sleeping a lot, which is one of the major advantages of being on vacation, was made particularly necessary by the first day of the first week, which involved airline problems you don’t want to know about, which led to late-night car rental problems you also don’t want to know about, followed by a long middle-of-the-night drive from La Guardia to Hartford. Nothing bad happened but it was grueling, and we are probably still making up the physical deficits incurred then and during the sit-up-straight red-eye flight to Rome a week ago.

The walking and eating are complementary activities in a mutual virtuous cycle, so we do those with enthusiasm every day—walking for exercise and also walking for checking the location of restaurants we have booked. (This gorgeous vegetarian pizza is from Popi Popi, a friendly neighborhood restaurant that is very popular and usually in the evening has long lines of people waiting for tables, who did not think to call or stop by earlier for a reservation.)

We have only been inside one church thus far, and it’s one we’ve visited numerous times before—the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, only a couple of hundred yards away from our apartment but endowed with gilded Byzantine mosaics of a number and quality rarely seen outside of Ravenna (which in case you didn’t know is THE place to see Byzantine mosaics). Mostly we’ve just been walking, sometimes at an ambling pace, sometimes faster, to the two grocery stores nearby, to see whether our old school is still there (it is), to avoid crowds and heat by walking in the shade of the sycamore trees along the Tiber.