Rome. It was the city of Rome that I visited aged 14 on my first ever trip to Italy, a country I’d later move to on three separate occasions (and who knows how many more times?) and a country whose language I’d later spend a total of five years studying. I travelled with my father and sister to visit her godfather, a family friend who was living in Rome and working  at the British Embassy at the time. It was before that trip that I first picked up an Italian phrasebook and started teaching myself phrases in Italian.

        On that first trip to Rome we of course visited the Spanish Steps, which link the Piazza di Spagna with the Piazza Trinità dei Monti, and just like every other person alive who’s been there, we swooned at the beauty of them. The beauty of the architecture, the flowers, the fountain, the melee of life and people, the atmosphere. I adore Rome and the endless number of historical, architectural, cultural and culinary jewels it possesses. There are 138 steps in total and they were built in the early 1700s, and are so-named the Spanish Steps because of the nearby Bourbon Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. I’ve been back to these steps a number of times and I last visited them with a local while I was living near Rome for a summer and au pairing for an Italian family. We lived on the beach by the Castello Odescalchi di Palo and I used to take the train into Rome on my one day off a week to explore the city.

        I’m convinced that I’ll live in Rome at some point and I know that those steps await me!