Eat, drink and be married... Coliseum, Vatican and cooking class!

So for the past couple days we have covered a lot of ground.... And a lot of Italian wines! We started off yesterday by buying our tickets for the coliseum at the forum and doing this actually saves you a lot of time and when you buy one pass you actually get entrances to the forum, palentino hill and the coliseum. After getting the tickets we stopped for a quick breakfast and then headed to the coliseum. We were so happy that we bought our tickets at the forum as we bypassed a huge long line for everyone else to purchase the tickets and walked right in.


What an amazing structure. It is so big and old and unique it truly is a wonder of the world. It took 10 years to complete the building of it and it is so intricate in the details of the underground cages and elevators are very impressive. We have decided to not do any of the guided tours as we typically get bored and hate being babysat, this one might have been beneficial because if you do some of the guides you get to go onto the platforms and down under the "stage" to see what the underground area looked like. Either way the coliseum is incredible. From the size to the carvings in the rocks and the statues and just amazing.


We left the coliseum and went towards palentine hill, from there they have ruins from where the upper class Romans once lived. There are views of the coliseum and there are many structures that are still being discovered as they had been buried to build new Rome. I never knew that Rome is a city built ontop of a city. Old Rome is meters below the main road and is still being discovered. There are many projects in many areas where they are still discovering old ruins and houses. There is so much history and fables and myths that go along with many of the structures around here you could spend months uncovering them.

From palentine hill we went to the forum which is where many of the ruins had been dug up and now the forum sits below the street level in a outdoor display of ruins of all shapes and sizes. As you walk through you get to see what some of the temples might have looked like, how there were underground walkways and the pillars there are either in pieces on the ground or are still upright.  We cut our trip a little short as we were feeling hungry and the heat didn't help. I am not complaining about the heat in the slightest we just needed to take a break from the direct sun. So we went for a roman lunch, typically is around 4 in the afternoon and includes wine. We wanted to try for a small lunch so we opted for pizza ( 1 each ) with a bottle of wine and then walked across the parking lot for cannoli's. OMG a real Italian cannoli is amazing!!!  The best combination of crunchy outside with a pudding/ icing inside it is heavenly... Even Geoff loved it.

We decided we needed a short nap and then headed out for dinner. Dinner is around 8 at night here that's when all the restaurants are packed and you have a 3 or 4 course meal. We decided to head out to a place we found on the Internet, it specializes in wine pairing and amazing food. It did not disappoint! We got there and found a line up and the restaraunt packed. A great sign! We waited for about half an hr for our table but it was worth it, we started with a cheese platter made our way through a insalata mista and then pasta. The pasta is so good here the lasagne that Geoff had had so much flavour it was incredible, I had a Sicilian tomatoe and eggplant dish that was also incredible. We paired the dishes to what the staff had recommended and ended up with a fantastic mixture of new italian wines. By this time we were too full for anything else so we tried to walk off the fullness around the piazza Navona. Too full for any kind of dessert we ended up coming back home.

Our start to the next day was a slow one with the Vatican on our to do list and nothing else. We grabbed lunch on the way and wandered around the inside and out of the Vatican. It was about a 20 min walk from where we are staying and when we got there, there was a lineup to get through the metal detectors. After wandering through the basilica we ended up wanting to climb up the top of the dome for a great city view point. It was an interesting climb up very narrow staircases but the top was worth it. We decided to not do the tour through the museum and ended up having an easy night around our area of town.

We got up early this morning and were very excited for out day full of Italian cooking! The class was 11 people and worth every penny, the instructor was a younger funny fellow who was an incredible teacher. We made an appetizer, pasta ( including noodles ) 2 mains and dessert! The appetizer was pumpkin blossoms filled with either prosciutto or eggplant and mozzarella, it is then battered with beer batter and fried. Served with it we made a tomatoe and basil pesto sauce from scratch. It was amazing neither Geoff or I had ever had anything like it but we swore we would find something similar back home to recreate it. The pasta was fettuccini with tomatoe basil and ricotta cheese sauce, again so delicious and different for us, something we will definitely make  at home. The first main was eggplant Parmesan I wasn't breaded and was more mozzarella than parm and the second was a beef, sage and mozzarella with prosciutto pan fried and both were amazing. Finally to finish it off was home made tiramisu!! I was so happy to be learning this recipe! So I spent most of my time make the tiramisu while everyone was doing the prep. I am so happy to finally be able to make it on
my own. The instructor and his wife had homemade everything from jams and limoncello, after half of the class was done we asked if we could sample the limoncello and it was so good we had to take a small bottle home. We are now finishing what will be one of our final bottles of Italian wine and heading out for a later dinner. It will be sad to leave here but were looking forward to Egypt!