ROME 2: A day of wandering in Rome; for such a huge city, the major sights are quite concentrated, and it's easy to walk around to get to where you want to go. Plus the metro in Rome isn't very good compared to somewhere like Barcelona, or Paris, where you are supposedly never more than 500m away from a metro station! However, once I found out why there is such a poor metro system in Rome, I was a little more forgiving: every time they try to excavate new metro lines and add more stations, they run into ancient Roman ruins and have to stop and turn it into an archaeological dig! The Spanish Steps Bernini's Barcaccia fountain at the base of the Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna: Barcaccia means ugly boat! Piazza del Popolo, above those steps is the beautiful Pincio gardensAfter lunch I went to see a small exhibition on the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci; this bike was constructed from his drawings. It's amazing when you consider how long ago he came up with the idea, along with the helicopter, the submarine, flying machines, a tank.
A fountain towards the start of the gardens on the way to the Villa Borghese. The gardens around the villa are enormous, they stretch for kilometres. Hard to believe they were once somebody's backyard!!The villa itself which is now home to an art gallery

A squirrel!! A real live squirrel! Believe it or not I was more excited to see this than anything else in Rome that day, I'd never seen one before, not even in a zoo! I've since seen another one and got just as excited, they're so cute! Takes me back to when I was little and used to read the Children of Cherry Tree Farm by Enid Blyton, and wished I had a squirrel as a pet too!