Our Trip to Rome - 2

We are staying at a really nice Bed & Breakfast in Rome, near the world-famous Coliseum and Termini - Rome's main railway station. They call it El Dorado Colleseum Hotel. It is located on the second floor of a big building that judging from its architecture and design used to be a 6-story wealthy family palazzo. It has high ceilings, a grand entrance and a big spiral staircase in the middle, with an obviously later addition of an old elevator that has a wooden bench and a set of double doors, with the inside wooden doors that must be open and closed manually. I have seen such elevators in some old New York City buildings, and they are most probably of the turn of the 20th century or early 1910s.

The elevator must have been installed at about the same time when the building was chopped up into apartments, two on each floor winging out into the left and right side of the building. Again, you can tell that our hotel used to be one apartment because it has a pretty decent-sized kitchen, a laundry/utility room, and a big bathroom with a large vintage bathtub and a toilet. I've only peaked into it when the owner of our hotel was cleaning the common areas. And then there are 5 guest rooms on both sides of the hallway, some bigger than others, suggesting that in the original apartment some were used as a living/dining areas and some - as bedrooms.

Our "hotel" is the only B&B in this building, but it seems that it is quite a common practice all over the city. In our former palazzo, all the other apartments are still private homes - you can tell by the name tags at the big entrance. And also by all sorts of sounds coming from all over the building. For example, on Christmas Eve our neighbors upstairs on the third floor had a great party - someone in that apartment plays piano very well, and they had a blast there singing all sorts of Christmas songs in English and dancing so enthusiastically our ceiling lamp was swaying. My son and I even wanted to crash that party if it went on beyond midnight, but they wrapped it up pretty quickly after that.

The owners of our B&B are a really nice married couple in their early 30s. They are very friendly, speak decent English and are a great source of information about the city. I am not sure if they were the ones who converted the apartment into a hotel, but that must have cost them a penny because each room now has a bathroom with a toilet and shower. You can see in the picture this was a much later addition because the bathroom ceiling does not go all the way up to the original room ceiling, as the bathroom was clearly boxed into the room.

The only bad thing about this hotel is thin walls between the guest rooms. We can hear everything from our neighbor's rooms on the right and left: people using the toilets and showers, as well as other rooms' TVs. I'm sure our neighbors on the right can hear me typing right now, as it's well after midnight and it gets very quiet at night in our street. The neighbors on the right seem to be women of three generations: grandma, mother, and daughter of about 5-6 who watches a lot of Italian cartoons in the evening until she falls asleep.

Our neighbors on the left are a young couple who just checked in today (the room was empty for a couple of days). They had a rigorous session of love-making about an hour ago. Even though they tried to be quiet, they were so loud my son decided to go for a walk and I put on my noise cancelling headphones. They are done now, and one of them is snoring as if they are in the bed next to me. My son is still walking the streets of Rome while talking to his girlfriend. He told me there's more privacy out there than in our hotel.

Nevertheless, I really like our stay and am glad I booked this hotel. It's close to everything, we do a lot of walking, and the owners are super nice.

Today (Dec.26) we spent a whole day on the trip to Pompeii and Amalfi Coast, with a short visit to a small picturesque and charming town of Ponsitano. It was absolutely wonderful and extremely educational: it is one thing to learn about the Pompeii disaster from the textbooks and another - to see the ruins in person. I highly recommend this tour if you are ever in Italy.