Dawn comes early and we sleep late … and sleep … and sleep … emerging from the apartment around two after a few hours of breakfast, consulting maps, researching history and architecture, reassembling our gear, and discovering more stuff absent from our careful packing. Outside, not a cloud in endless blue sky and 85 degrees but low humidity. Lovely day. Streets pleasantly peopled with barely clad college couples, overdressed old folks, and families with gaggles of kids on their phones as the parents peer myopically at maps, turning them this way and that to get oriented. Oh … wait … that’s us, too.

We head to the Pantheon without tickets of any kind, knowing full well we won’t get in today, but eager just to see it. Largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, built 2,000 years ago. The trick: lots of broken pottery and pumice used for the top layers to reduce weight.

HUGE lines thread through the immense columns in the front portico and crowds throng the large fountain in the piazza, knots of people filling their water bottles from the three spigots of a green metal water fountain a little smaller than a typical hydrant. The columns came from Egypt, barged up the Nile, crated on ships to Ostia, and carted to Rome.

iPhones at port arms, we navigate cobbled streets to Largo di Torre Argentina (actually named after the German bishop, Johannes Burckardt, whose Latin name was Argentoratum, a long story there you might figure). Why are we here? Answer 1: Julius was stabbed to death at the entrance to a theater between two of the four temples in this sunken piazza now full of ruins. It also houses Rome’s oldest colony of felines (left there by people who no longer wanted them, and/or attracted by nearby butchers who left their scraps in the sunken ruins, and/or by the profusion of “Gattari or Gattare” (dedicated cat carers). We see both the site of Caeser’s death and a few cats braving the mid-afternoon sun, plus signs admonishing against feeding the cats.

Cynthia says, let’s go east to the Piazza Venezia near where the Victor Emmanuel monument has one of the highest points in the city to view all Rome at sunset, and get an outdoor table to have a drink and a snack before we take the monument’s elevator to “the big view.”

Great idea.

We clomp a distance down main streets and find massive construction and congested traffic all around the VE. Not a single bar of any ambiance. We wend through back streets hoping to find a quiet, amenable spot. One thing leads to another and we climb half way up the back of hill behind the VE, and are rewarded by really panoramic views of the forum. We climb back down to the front, hunting for the elevator (‘cause of “the leg”) and finally locate some nice security guards who call the moment’s “deputy underassistant guardian and royal preventer of elevator use by unauthorized unimportant citizens” — the guy who wouldn’t let us on the elevator 750 hobbled steps ago — and he let’s us take the elevator this time around to the VE’s second floor.

Where there is a curving wall of columns — Romans LOVE their columns — behind the immense bronze of Victor Emmanuel, father of the country, himself upon a horse that is 43 feet long. (Factoid: VE upon the horse has a mustache that’s five feet wide).

We hit the second-floor cafe under a balcony table’s umbrella for a Limoncello Spritz and a Negroni and ogle one small corner of the old forum beneath two of Rome’s miraculously still somewhat pine-forested seven hills. Then we buy tickets for the elevator to the top and WHAT A VIEW. Wowzer. Veni, Vidi, Vici.

We walk all the way home ‘cause taxis are plentiful and always full. We buy a mushroom and salcicchia pizza and salad greens and open the bottle of white left to us by our host, Ginevre, and everything is deliziosa and tutto bene.

We go to bed pretty quick because we have to wake at 6:20 to get a taxi for our “early morning small group tour” of the Vatican Museum.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (or not).