6th Day - Shopping in Rome

Thursday, 2/25: Up around 8, breakfast at the hotel, and out to the metro. We were looking for Salaria Road because we saw some nice stores there on the bus ride to Florence. We found it and bought some more olive oil in one of the stores. We also found a good fresh market in that area.

We walked though more stores and bought some Italian cook books. By then we were a long way from a train, so we took a bus to the nearest train station. We looked for a bus that would take us to the Appian Way, but they only went there on Sundays, so we couldn’t do that. We went shopping in a nice grocery store with some unusual items; one of the things they sold was frozen octopus. While we were there an older gypsy was also there, and he was being followed and watched every minute by a store employee. Next we went back to the Coliseum and the Forum ruins.  We went into a large building nearby and saw an exhibit about “150 years of the republic”. For dinner we found a restaurant by the Pantheon, where I had spaghetti with clams, and Randy had pizza with prosciutto, mushrooms, olives and artichokes, washed down with 1/2 liter of white wine and cappuccino. Then back to the hotel for the night.