Rome Weekend - Day 1

It was a nice day in the south of  England but, if the BBC forecast is to be believed, we are leaving behind several days of heavy rain. The BA Gatwick lounge was the usual oasis but the wi-fi was off due to some careless workmen. There seems to be some development going on at North Terminal. I hope it is worthwhile because the airport was pretty quiet today. I took a lot of photographs through glass and later found I was not very pleased with them. My aerial shots of Paris, the Alps and Rome were also pretty unexciting.

Arrival in Fiumicino was OK with baggage delivery not too bad. Outside the terminal I thought it was unnecessarily chaotic. The transfer bus we were offered went only to the inconvenient Ostiense station. We went off to the train as originally planned. I was astonished when the man selling the TRAIN tickets tried to sell me shuttle tickets on the grounds that the shuttle (he was offering) went to the Termini forecourt whereas the airport train stops at Platform 28 which leaves a substantial walk within the station. That is true but I can not imagine he had any official sanction for his sideline. The airport train, branded 'Leonardo Express' is a rather scruffy train which takes 32 minutes to reach the centre at speeds of 40-60Km/h and has only a moving map to recommend it. The local train is cheaper and identified by having far more external graffiti. I don't particularly like arriving somwhere in the dark even when I have been before. Our 1000m walk at Termini station ended at a slightly anarchic taxi rank. Italian driving is unnecessarily fast but I imagine it might be worth owning a Kwik-Fit with plenty of pads and linings. I thought our taxi driver might be coked up although it is difficult to tell in an Italian taxi. He kept on sniffing and touching his nose; I don't think he had  a cold. There was just one more scam to negotiate. We ate at Caffe Strega near the hotel. The food was good but when we received the bill, they claimed the card machine was not working and asked if we could pay in cash. I refused. Inside the machine was working perfectly well.