We took yesterday really easy: swimming in a local spot that we’d not found before, reading and terrace time, a good lie in.
That set us up well for a long travel day today. Rome’s pretty easy to get to, there’s a main high speed line from Genoa to Rome, going through La Spezia just south of the Cinque Terre… but it’s expensive to use high speed trains on an Interrail pass, especially in Italy.
You have to pay for reservations, on top of the cost of your pass, and even though train tickets for children travelling with an adult are generally free or heavily discounted in European countries, reservations are not.
I found that we could do this journey pretty cheaply, with a break in Pisa to see a certain tower and have lunch, without using one of our seven pass travel days. Often in France, Italy, Spain, it’s cheaper to just buy normal tickets than to use the pass.
For the four of us, it was €88 for the journey, and would have been €20-48 for reservations on top of the travel day, which costs about €150 alone.
In Pisa, the tower is a bit of a walk from the station, and Jennie had really bad blisters so it was good that we have four hours or so. We adopted Mediterranean pace, and worked through Angus’ protestations about this being the worst holiday ever, which duly evaporated when we got to the square.
Almost literally a whistle-stop tour, it was really fun to just go and do the touristy thing, then get some focaccia and gelato, before a quick sketch in the sunshine, and then hopping back on the train to Rome.
There were plenty of places to go in and explore if we’d had longer, but we didn’t want ti pay then rush through them.
The baptistery and cathedral are also amazing… and apparently there are nine other leaning towers in Pisa if you know where to look.
On the way, if you plan your route carefully, there’s a cool mural, Keith Haring’s last public work.
We got to Rome in late afternoon, and quickly adjusted our route when we realised the train stopped at nearer our hotel before it went to Termini. A fleeting glimpse of St. Peter’s dome as we came out of the tunnel tipped us off!
Jennie’s birthday present was 4 nights at the Crowne Plaza, so we could have a pool. We have clear memories of roasting in the August heat in Florence on our honeymoon! It’s a bit further out of town though, so we grabbed a couple of 1-week travel cards from the tabacchi in the station (€24 each, kids are free) so that we could go in and out of town easily.
Unfortunately we still didn’t make it to the hotel in time to get half an hour in the pool before it closed at 19:00, but we headed in to town to grab some amazing pizza and pasta, and hang out in foro, as one does!
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