Rome: Apartment living Roman Style

Our apartment is located just a short walk from Piazza del Popolo, via Flaminia 56, on the top (6th) floor.  It has great air conditioning which has made life in Rome on these hot hazy days much more pleasant.

This is the bedroom which is reflected in the wall of floor to ceiling mirrored closets.  The door on the right leads into the hallway and the one on the left is to the second smaller bedroom.

This is part of the living room which is very large and airy.  The ceilings have lovely decoration which you can partly see in this picture.  Satellite tv brings many more English speaking channels than we were lead to believe for surfing with our AM coffee (thus our current fondness for Family Guy) or nightly cordial.

This is the other part of the living room and Alan is busy writing.  What does Karen do while Alan is working?

Karen has learned to make french press coffee. Thank you Google for the instructions.  The biggest two challenges are: 1) The coffee pot only makes one cup at a time.  So when each person is having 2 cups in the morning it is very time consuming.  2) Making french press with Italian espresso grind. This results in a fine sludge that must be strained out before the pot can be rinsed and used for the next cup (thus the strainer for the sludge).  

 

Karen does laundry (yes, we have a washer).  Our small balcony has served very nicely as a clothes dryer (thank you Alan, for suggesting we bring a clothesline).  Clothes dry very quickly in the summer sun.  Except when it rains - which it did for the first time yesterday.

It's not all drudgery for her though.  Karen takes morning walks.  Not as often as in Vienna though, since it is very hot and she sprained her foot about 10 days before we left (a very slick move)






Karen also has found a supermercato about 20 minutes walk from the apartment and so she can combine walking and shopping for basics (coffee for example).  The supermarket is in Prati across the Tiber.  Unfortunately the Tiber is not a very pretty river.   There is a great deal of algae and garbage is strewn along the banks. 

But the architecture is beautiful.  This is what we see every day when we leave our apartment and head in the direction of Piazza del Popolo.

There is also a lovely group of buildings on the route to the market. There are a least five that all have this same design which looks a bit art nouveau-ish  It took me a while to notice them because I was so intent on not getting lost among the twisting streets. 

We did present a challenge to our building mates the first few days.  We did not know that both sets of doors had to be closed for the elevator to work.  I have climbed the stairs myself (voluntarily) and each floor has a set of 22 stairs, 110 to our floor.

They let us know what to do