27 Jul 2019
We lucked out with Alessandro. He is mellow and scholarly and easy to understand. He has a comfy car and he brought us places we never would have found ourselves. Among other places we went to San_Clemente_al_Laterano and Santa_Cecilia_in_Trastevere. Here is what I thought was so cool - the layers. Roman stuff in the subbasement, then 3d century on that, then 11th century, then 16th century. St Cecilia had a little room with the most beautiful early 20th century mosaics. We went other places too. We had an awesome lunch in the TransTibere neighborhood. It was high season and there were hardly any other tourists in any of these places we went!
Alessandro kept my girls (12 and 15) interested and engaged. He functioned well as a tender to gently move me along from staring at Latin inscriptions (I do not read Latin).
We had the morning available the next day and again by luck he was available for an ad hoc tour. He brought us to the Trevi fountain, the Fontana Della Bacaccia, a sweet museum about the old city wall, out along the beautiful Appian way to look at mausoleums and then dropped us off where our Vatican group tour was supposed to start. He went in and made sure it was right. I wish we had stayed with him for the Vatican.
It was excellent and interesting stuff for all 4 of us, way more than we find on our own, and we are trying.