Rome in March: a week on cobbles, a dome at 551 steps, and the fountain at six in the morning

Rome is a long way from Sydney, further than it looks on the map, and we arrived with the particular stupidity that comes from two stopovers and a night spent watching other people sleep. The hotel let us in early. I had a shower, lay down for what I said would be ten minutes, and woke up at four in the afternoon with Tom standing over me holding two paper cones of gelato, pistachio and hazelnut, as a peace offering for having gone out without me. That is how Rome started, and honestly it set the tone.

The early mornings

The trick with Rome in a week is to get up before it does. The Trevi Fountain at six in the morning is a different animal from the Trevi Fountain at noon: the water is loud because nothing else is, the marble is pale blue in the early light, and there are perhaps nine of us, one of them a street sweeper. We threw our coins over the left shoulder like everyone has since the film and walked back for coffee standing at a bar, which is how you drink it here, one euro, two minutes, done. We did St Peter's the same way, in the security queue by half past seven, and then the dome: five hundred and fifty-one steps, the last stretch a spiral so narrow and tilted that you walk with one shoulder on the wall, and then the whole city below you, every roof terracotta, the river a bend of green, Tom too out of breath to say anything clever.

The Pantheon in the rain was luck. There is a hole in the roof, nine metres across, open to the sky for nineteen hundred years, and when it rains the water falls in a straight grey column onto the marble floor, where small drains take it away as if the Romans had thought of everything, which they had. Piazza Navona afterwards, Bernini's fountain of the four rivers with the stone figure of the Nile covering his eyes, and street painters, and a cafe where a coffee sitting down costs four times what it costs standing, which we paid because my feet had opinions.

The big days

The Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine are one ticket and one very long day. The Colosseum is the one everyone photographs and the Palatine is the one I would send you to: the hill where the emperors built their palaces, now pines and ruins and views straight down into the Forum, where you can trace the road the triumphs came along and stand where Caesar was burnt. Tom read every sign. I sat on a fallen column in the sun, which I suspect is what most Romans did too.

The Vatican Museums are a marathon with a prize at the end. You walk for an hour through rooms of maps and tapestries and the thing every tour group is heading for, and then you are in the Sistine Chapel and a guard is saying no photos, silence, in four languages, and above you is the ceiling, and you stop being annoyed about the crowd. I had seen it a thousand times in books. It is not the same. The Galleria Borghese the day before was the opposite experience: a timed two-hour slot, booked weeks ahead, a few hundred people in a villa in a park, and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, her fingers turning into leaves as you walk round it, the marble so thin at the edges that the light comes through. I went back to it three times in the two hours. Tom found the Caravaggios and stayed there.

Tom's day

Gladiator school on the Appian Way was Tom's choice and I came to laugh. A man in a tunic taught a dozen adults how to hold a wooden sword and fall over convincingly, in a yard beside the old road with the original paving stones still there, grooved by cart wheels, and I did laugh, and then I did it too, and I was better than Tom, which he disputes. The hop-on bus the next day was the one thing we would skip: Rome's traffic does not care that you are on an open-top bus, and we spent forty minutes looking at the back of a van near the Piazza Venezia.

The Spanish Steps are now a place you look at rather than sit on, since sitting is fined, and the designer shops at the bottom are a place Tom looked at while I kept walking. What we did sit on, every evening, was Trastevere. Across the river, small streets, washing on lines, and at seven the whole neighbourhood comes out for an aperitivo in the square in front of Santa Maria, a glass of something orange and a bowl of crisps, then dinner down a side street in a place with paper tablecloths: cacio e pepe, carbonara that has never met cream, fried artichokes, a litre of house red for less than a glass costs at home. The food tour on our second night, with wine, taught us the suppli, a fried rice ball with mozzarella inside that pulls into a string when you break it, and after that we ordered one everywhere.

What I know now

March is right: cool mornings, warm afternoons, a cardigan and one wet day. Book the Borghese before you book the flight. Do the dome early and the chapel late. Skip the bus, take the cobbles, buy the shoes with soles. And have the gelato for breakfast at least once, because you are a long way from home and nobody is counting.