Italy Day 5 - New Years Eve in Roma

Left the sleepy town of San Felice early today to head into Roma and drop the car back at Termini. We had heard so many bad stories about the traffic and were expecting quite an experience, but either cause we'd had a few days practice outside of Rome or traffic was light being new years eve, we really didn't have any issues.. just gotta go with the flow and expect people to move in every direction! [Would have helped if we had put the right address in the SatNav though!]

Headed straight to the hotel (Hotel Columbus) to drop our bags off, and while we knew we were near the Vatican, didn't quite realise just how close.. 100m max

We had a wander round the Vatican and Castel St Angelo before heading off to meet Darren (one of Matt's mates from Oz) and his family for dinner. There was a great party atmosphere around the city with lots of markets and street performers in all the piazzas.

After a little scare with a certain white bag that we thought had gone missing (we can laugh now!) we had dinner at Piazza Navona - some really nice Pizza and Pasta.. what else.

Not long after dinner we parted ways and Matt and I headed towards where we had heard there would be fireworks... near the Collosseum. We only had to wait 20 mins... but even then I'm not quite sure if it was worth it?!! If I had to describe it in one word it would be 'chaotic'! Definitely not like the organised event in Sydney. There were firecrackers and bungers going off everywhere... one right next to my foot... I definitely wasn't surprised at how many ambulances were around... In the middle of one intersection, people were running in and letting off fireworks... I mean the big ones going up at least 50-100m up. All I could think of was how likely it would be for it to fall over or head off into the wrong direction... fun though, in a chaotic stupid kinda way! Now that I think about it there was a lot more random fireworks than there were as part of the main display.