A love letter to Rome: Precious Principessa on the last leg of her holiday in Europe

Bloody bugger me. I don't like to focus too much on the weather but it is an obsession for most people. I think I heard that it's the wettest summer in Sydney since 1965. Don't quote me on that. I might be making it up.

And while it buckets down yet again and I hear the whooshing of car tyres up and down my street, my daughter Precious Princess (in the headline I have written it in Italian - Sono una persona intelligente) is in Rome where the temperature is 1 degree.

I just discovered Google Translate and it's amazing! From now on I will do multi-lingual posts. Je plaisante! 

In the meantime, here is an email letter from my eldest daughter, on the last leg of her European adventure in Roma, where she has discovered REAL pizza (for breakfast, lunch and dinner), truffles, wine and good table manners. 

Hey mum!! 

Thanks for your Rome advice, our accommodation is about 5 mins from the Castel Sant' Angelo! It's a beautiful castle, and the bridge next to it is even more amazing, with statues of men and women lining both sides. 

We were lucky enough to go there when it had just snowed, so the whole bridge was white and not only lined with the beautiful statues, but it was also completely white and was lined with many additional snowmen/women. 

Europe's weather has gone crazy in the past week if you haven't heard, there was a huge storm that came over from the east and areas such as Amsterdam dropped to -25 degrees and all the canals froze over!! Would have been amazing to see!! 

Italy only got the a little taste of the bad weather with quite heavy snow and temp dropping to -3 (it was the first heavy snow to hit Rome in 25 years!!). When we arrived in Rome, everything was chaos, heaps of trains were cancelled and delayed. 

Ours was cancelled but luckily we spoke to an official who got us on a train that was about to depart and was high speed to Rome. I think most trains after this got cancelled as the bad weather worsened. 

When we got to Rome, none of the streets had been plowed like in Germany and Austria, as I don't think they had any plowing equipment so cars were sliding down hills and people on bikes and scooters were sliding everywhere; the roads were crazy!!

Anyway, this was four days ago and the weather has been clear for two days now, but still snow everywhere. It took them till yesterday to finally plow roads and all the streets are now ice covered. 

Besides this Rome is AMAZING!! We saw the Colosseum covered in snow, and the ruins and Roman Forum too. It's just ridiculous how much of the city is ruins - you turn a corner and there's another monument that's 2000 years old. 

We climbed right to the top of the Basilica yesterday which was the best view in the whole world.

Our apartment here is about two mins walk from the Vatican City and you can see the dome of the Basilica from the end of our street!!! 

The food here has also been amazing, but I won't get started on that as I could write a thesis on it. But everything is great here. 

Heading to Barcelona tomorrow by plane and flying with "Veuling" airlines. Sounds suss but not as suss as Southern China so don't stress. 

Will call you when I land!!!

Some people have all the luck. Let's hope it continues.

PS: I take no responsibility for overuse of exclamation marks and bad punctuation or misspelt words.