Goodbye, Rome (travel blog part 7)

On the last day of my trip, I was pretty worn out and didn't take many pictures at all, so this should go pretty quickly. I started off walking by the Trevi Fountain (before it got too busy) and planned to stop at the Vittorio Emanuele monument, where you can go up to the roof and get a great view out over Rome, but then I just didn't. From there, I walked past the Forum (through the Line C construction site that has hardly changed since the last time I was in Rome nearly a decade ago, except for expanding into the Piazza Venezia in front of the Vittorio Emanuele), around the Coliseum, past the Palatine Hill, Circus Maximus, Baths of Caracalla, and Aurelian Walls without taking a single picture of any of those things. I was just in the mood to have some time to myself, and all of those places were packed, so I just kept walking. 

I was vaguely heading in the direction of the Appian Way, and eventually ended up there, but continued with the theme of not taking very many pictures. I did think the button-copy sign towards the start of the ancient road was pretty neat -- I don't believe I've ever seen button copy anywhere else in Italy! 

Much wandering and a long bus and metro ride later, I ended up at Piazza Navona, where there's a newly-opened small archeological area showing part of the ancient stadium the plaza was built upon and around. This was finally somewhere that wasn't super busy, and it ended up being the only place I paid to go in that day. 

Even more wandering later, I ended up back at Termini for another ride on the Roma-Giardinetti line, which ended up being on another 90s tram. It would have been cool to get one more ride on the much older ones, but these are quite a bit nicer to ride. 

At Porta Maggiore, I spotted one of the 40s-era regular trams, which I promptly rode right back to Termini. These are the oddballs of the Rome tram fleet, being the only ones that are single-ended and single-sided (which must limit what routes they can be run on), and also the only high-floor trams on the regular network. They're pretty cute, and have a similarly green interior to the 90s ones (Anonymous in Houston, one of these pictures shows the gross green fabric seats I mentioned in my response to your comment yesterday). They also have some sort of weird ratcheting window mechanism I haven't seen elsewhere! 

Another early-90s SOCIMI tram showed up to take me back to Porta Maggiore, and I was able to get a seat up front with a view through the operator's cab. That's a nice feature, and none of Rome's other trams have anything like this! 

 

After that, I took yet another tram out to Trastevere for dinner. This was another 90s (green) tram, and its next stop screens appeared to be possessed by skulls and dollar signs! I didn't even capture the stop request light randomly flashing on and off. 

Rome's buses are a bit odd, with a full-width, completely separated cab for the driver (which blocks half of the front door). They also have a seat looking forward right in the front of the bus, which is super cool and I wish American buses had something like that! I finally managed to get that seat on the ride back to the hotel, where I picked up the massive amount of luggage (mostly filled with candy and cookies for me and my parents) that they had kindly stored for me. The reflection on the windshield shows the fancy next stop/alerts/ads screen that ATAC has on pretty much all of their buses -- this one was just showing an error message, and none of the buses I rode on this trip actually had these working. Now you see why I kept making jokes about Italian transit and malfunctioning digital displays! 

The biggest problem with taking Turkish Airlines is their schedule into and out of Rome. The flight in lands around 10 at night, and the outbound leaves before 7 in the morning, meaning I had to get up at 3:30 to head to the airport, despite spending another night at the hotel connected to the airport. It's the very first non-Schengen flight out in the morning, and if there are any Schengen flights earlier, there's no more than a few. I did walk all the way out to the far end of the Schengen part of the terminal, where Fiumicino recently built a very nice new concourse. I particularly like the giant LED displays on each gate that even show a photo of the destination; I wonder how long it will be before these stop being updated. (This isn't just an Italy thing -- custom LED displays in airports almost always end up getting abandoned after a couple decades as the technology becomes obsolete, but some airports still keep installing them instead of just switching to off-the-shelf TVs that can always be replaced.)

Practically nothing was open this early in the morning, but I had to get a picture of Deli&cia, a food stand chain that's all over airports in Italy. I always laugh at the name because, well, the CIA part looks odd to us Americans! Also, CIA is the airport code for Rome's other airport, Ciampino (mostly served by Ryanair). 

After going through exit passport control, there's another new part of the airport that I've taken to calling "the mall"; it's also home to the lounge, which was pretty boring but at least allowed me to get some free breakfast (and it was empty at that time of the morning since my flight was the only non-Schengen one anywhere close to that time).  

The mall connects to another new concourse, one that's unfortunately far more boring than the new Schengen one. This is where my flight arrived and where most flights leave from these days, but not mine this time! 

I was excited to find that instead, I would get to relive old memories by taking a sunrise people mover ride out to the satellite, which was the only non-Schengen concourse back when I used to visit Rome regularly. Since this used to be the only concourse, it wasn't designed to let you go back to the terminal without going through security again, which I didn't want to do, so I'm glad my flight was leaving from here or otherwise I wouldn't have been back to this weirdly nostalgic spot. 

The satellite does look quite a bit different than it did back then, with most of the shops and restaurants having moved to the mall section and a new drop ceiling mostly covering the old chunky spaceframe. The satellite has a very interesting design where the departures area is one level above the jetbridges, so you go down an escalator before boarding (the arrivals corridor is on the jetbridge level). This gives you an interesting view down on the planes below, though the outward-angled windows caused some really annoying reflections at this time in the morning! 

I think I'm going to call this one here. There should just be one more post in this series, covering the flights home along with more from IST, then it will finally be back to normal on the blog!