Rome Wasn't Built in a Day

We are home! Back in Florida! But I have a few more blog posts that I must get down. Levi and I keep commenting that there were more hours in a day in Europe than there are here. Wah.

Rome life! Here are some pictures of our apartment in Rome. For an apartment so close to the city center, it was spacious! And really very lovely. But it was very European, in that there was no air conditioning (yes, I've mentioned that a million times), no dishwasher, and no clothes dryer!

I love the high ceilings. Apparently because it is a historic building they weren't allowed to build ducts in the apartments for air conditioning.

I actually did not miss the dryer. It felt so very Italian to hang our clothes on the line out the windows of the apartment, especially as the nuns across the alley sang their Vespers in Italian (or Latin maybe? Not sure). I kind of loved that time.

I was always so afraid of dropping clothes into the neighbors garden. I did drop a few clothespins, haha.

The volume is very low but you can hear a little of it.

Around the corner was a big public "park" (I put the quotation marks because there are not the grassy expanses I'm used to, haha) called Villa Torlonia. There are several historic buildings there, including the house Mussolini made his palace.

Mussolini's villa

Called the Swiss Hut

Also around the corner was the most fantastic gelato place! My favorite flavor was blood orange with whipped cream on top, and of course Levi J always got chocolate (fudge, whipped cream, a cookie, all for €2!)

Once we finally found a big grocery store (with a parking lot, haha), grocery shopping was fun! There was such an amazing selection of pastas, fresh meatballs, and cheeses! It's always hard shopping with the kids, especially when you're not familiar with the foods, but I found so many things that I really really loved.

Um, but we definitely did not try the horse meat, ha.

Cheeeeeese!

We loved the ward in Rome. We met lots of wonderful people there, and someone always offered to translate for us when there wasn't official translation going on.

Junior Primary and Nursery got combined a lot since so many people go out of town in August.

There's one other picture I want to post, this awesome butter cookie with the Romulus and Remus image on it! If I had more room in my suitcase (read: any room in my suitcase, ha), I would have brought back a bag.

This post may only be interesting to me, remembering some little things about Rome that will disappear from my memory in a week or two. But these are some of the things that made it so incredibly awesome to be there a whole month, finding all these little beautiful snippets of Rome.