Today was almost completely unplanned. We had considered doing a couple of museums, but it would take a lot of time and effort, and we’re not very patient people. I wanted to go to the App ian Way, which was the old road to Rome, so we walked in that direction after breakfast. When we…

We had breakfast at the hotel again. Weirdly, when we got to the breakfast area and I told the attendant our room number in Italian (I’d been practicing!), she had no idea what I was saying and we had to repeat the number in English. We decided that since this hotel was more for international…

On Friday, Rome was rainy. We had breakfast at our hotel and started to walk toward the Roman Forum in the drizzle. On our way out, we saw that a tree a few blocks from our hotel had been hit by lightning in the thunderstorm the night before. The blackened stump was being demolished by…

Story by Nicole We didn’t learn any Italian before coming to Rome. The closest we got was when we boarded our second plane, from Newark to Rome, and Jason realized that the screens on the seats in front of us had games, among them a language learning game. We quickly became masters of arbitrary nouns—gatto,…