The thing about Rome is that it’s busy, crowded, noisy, polluted, & a teensy bit overbearing.
As a visitor in Rome (visitor is self-gratifying vernacular for “tourist”) you often feel exposed & vulnerable; it could be the touts selling “official guided tours” of the sights, or the gypsy beggars & larkish children after your purse or wallet, or even the very smartly dressed, clean shaven man in a suit who is “lost” & needs help with directions.
In Rome, you’re always a little on guard which sometimes makes it hard to relax.
Fortunately we weren’t interested in racing all over the city like a character in a Dan Brown novel trying to discover the hidden secrets of Rome, we simply wanted to take in a few ancient sites, taste something genuinely Roman (cured pig cheek – “guanciale” – in your carbonara, anyone?) and have picnics in random places (on the cobbles, backs against the obelisk, St. Peter’s Square; box seats in the wings, thunderstorm threatening, Trevi Fountain; clawfooted bathtub, another Brunello…..that’s another story!!!)
Rome tends to be on the world’s “you gotta go here” list, but if we are brutally honest (hey, brutally… Et tu, Brutus… Romans, Caesars, Honesty… Did I miss something?) we were glad to leave at the end of 4 days.
Seems like Kendall threw that coin into the Trevi for nothing.
littleredtreefrog 
Wow=kendall=beard
I know – I have tamed it a bit now but I needed it to smuggle the Norwegian hedgehog into Scotland (they are close relatives and the Scottish Hedgehog went extinct under the tyrannical rule of the English). Once they were safely released into the North Western Highlands I was able to trim the beard back.