Cor blimey, I'm getting very behind on my quirky but sometimes hopefully amusing narration of the publishable bits of my life! Where were me? Ah yes, Rome:

Well, Rome is a fab place - but I needn't write that here! It was hot hot hot all the while we were there, which made a blessed change from the dreary summer in Munich. Our first foray into the city (after breakfast in our deliciously central hotel) was past the Castell Sant'Angelo and over the Tiber into the windy narrow roads of the heart of the city.

From there we wound slowly hither and thither through Piazza Navona, past innumerable churches, soaking up the atmosphere (and the sun). We stopped for a quick coffee before entering the Pantheon - ah! what a building! And I love the fact that today's technology is not in a position even to explain, let alone replicate, this temple's peerless concrete monster of a roof. Hats off to the Romans of yore!

There was lots more sightseeing (past the Trevi Fountain, to the Spanish Steps, over the Piazza del Popolo) and some dangling of our weary feet in refreshing fountains before we had our first gelato of the weekend. Oh My God!! I wasn't sure how good an idea it was to have ruby grapefruit ice cream, but I ordered it anyway and it was DIVINE!!!

For dinner we headed out to Trastevere to find a nice little place, and ended up in an okay little place with unexceptional food. We made up for this slight downer by having coffees and Duff Beer (of Simpsons fame - what an inspired piece of marketing) and watching people go by. Then it was a quick walk up and down the Tiber to get nighttime photos of St Peter's and finally a bus back to our hotel.

Day Two was much the same as Day One really, only with different churches and the huge added bonus of meeting up with Chris & Kate (they left the girls with Michaela at the beach). Together we wandered past the Colosseum, along the Forum and up the Vittorio Emanuele monument before diving into the old town again for a second Pantheon stop and other delights.

We parted ways in the late afternoon and Christian & I had dinner in Trastevere a second time, this time in a delicious restaurant with pleasant conversation with an American lady at the next table who was reasonably high up in Barack Obama's election campaign in Florida. She bemoaned the numbskulledness of her compatriots at another nearby table (a gaggle of girls, one of whom it seemed had mastered the dark art of simultaneously eating pizza and talking shite).

Day Three (Sunday) we reserved for the beach, taking the local train out as far as it went and then jumping on a bus to cover the stretch down the coast to Torvaianica, where Michaela, Chris and the others were all staying. We met up with them at their hotel and then went to Michaela's friend Tony's house for lunch (it was Tony's birthday party the night before that had led Michaela to choose to come to Rome this week in the first place).

That afternoon we messed around in the sea with Chris and the kids, playing piggy in the middle with the frisbee that Chris had brought along. It was scorching hot, and the water was the perfect temperature. Sadly though, it was not very pleasant-tasting; I'm not sure I'd rush back to that beach for water quality...

The journey back into town took an age, because it seemed half of Rome was on the same narrow road and what had taken us half an hour in the morning now took more like two hours. This was doubly annoying as I had arranged to catch up with my mate Nikos and his girlfriend for dinner in town. They ended up eating alone but we had a drink with them instead and it was lovely to see a new part of Rome (near the pyramid) with a couple of "locals" as guides.

Our last day was dedicated to the Vatican Museum. I had handily pre-booked tickets, so we didn't have to join the monster queue that was already stretching around two corners when we got there at nine o'clock. What a marvellous museum!! As if Rome wasn't chocabloc with art and history already, here was a distillation of over two thousand years of human creativity, with countless world-famous objets.

Primus inter pares (if you'll pardon the slip into Latin - well, it IS the Vatican after all!) is of course the Sistine Chapel, but I was particularly taken with the Etruscan art gallery - not least because it was a little off the beaten track and hence refreshingly uncrowded. Also unforgettable were some of the sculptures (the Laocoön springs immediately to mind).

And, in a deft piece of museum design, we were able to avoid total art fatigue by virtue of there being a café right before you get to the Sistine Chapel! I think the majesty of that space would have been wasted on me, had I not had a cheeky espresso macchiato and a cornetto (that's a croissant to you and me - and there was me thinking it was just a kind of ice cream!) just beforehand.

After about four hours of solid museum-going, it was time to bid Rome farewell. We headed back to the main station and thence to the airport, where one last treat awaited us: pizza! It seems hard to believe, but we hadn't actually had any pizza yet all the time we were in Rome. Okay, so it was a fast-food joint, nestled between a café and a Burger King. But this was ITALIAN fast food, and the pizza was so much better than most (but not all) of the offerings this side of the Alps.

So, all in all, another TOP weekend!