I know what you’re all thinking.

You’re thinking, what was it like on day two of Lex’s Italy trip?

Well, good news is I’m going to tell you.

And I might even get to day three.

You never know.

Your Daily Lex.

So imagine this.

It’s my second day in Rome.

I think you can imagine that.

You’ve got a good imagination.

That was a 30,000 step day.

We started at a Capitoline Hill and its museums.

We only explored one museum in full, but it was very cool.

We spent about two hours in that museum.

We saw a bunch of cool sculptures, including some enormous ones and cool paintings and other standard museum stuff.

And it was tricky because we wanted to experience the museum and really take it all in.

But we also had a busy day of things.

So we were keeping tabs on each other.

I’m especially the time obsessed one in the family.

Lauren is a time optimist.

So I was doing the work of being like, well, we can spend up to X hours here.

And that means we have to do these things and blah, blah, blah.

But it went well.

And one thing that we started doing before we would go to any museum is Googling.

What are the must see things at this museum?

And, you know, like when you go to the Louvre, you know, the must see thing is the Mona Lisa.

When you’re going to Florence, you know, the must see thing is going to be David.

But so at some of these museums, we didn’t always know.

In some cases, it was like, this is a must see thing.

And we were like, it doesn’t even look interesting.

So we didn’t bother.

But it was cool to know that there were things that were worth looking at.

So we leave that museum at Capitoline Hill and we walked to Largo de Torre, Argentina.

And by the way, sorry for any bad pronunciation I do.

But that’s an archaeological dugout site with four Roman temples.

It’s also the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination.

So the day before we saw Julius Caesar’s tomb and this day we saw the site of his assassination.

For some reason now, the site of that assassination is also a cat sanctuary where they take care of hundreds of stray cats.

We saw several.

They were cute.

Then we walked.

And again, this was so much walking.

We walked to the Great Synagogue of Rome.

Obviously, when you’re traveling, especially in Europe, you’re going to see some old classic churches.

And I’m always happy to do that.

But I thought it’d be fun to see some classic synagogues, too.

Honestly, there’s one city where we didn’t and should have.

But we did look at the Great Synagogue of Rome.

And it was a whole lot like fancy classic churches, except instead, you know, it’s a synagogue.

And the images of Jewish people were not on a cross.

The synagogue also had a museum, which we toured, and they gave a short tour of the synagogue.

It was beautiful.

And near the end of the tour, we asked the tour guide, hey, what’s your favorite nearby kosher restaurant?

And he said, he never bothered with the dairy ones.

Fine.

But that his favorite meat one was one called Bella Carne, which was perfectly, which was a perfect answer because that was exactly the one that I had suggested in my planning that we go to for lunch that day.

Lauren is not a huge meat eater, but she suggested we get a fancy cold cut appetizer, which we did.

And then we each got the same entree, which was a creamy pasta with peppery beef chopped up.

And it was sort of like a carbonara, but, you know, it’s beef and it’s not really dairy cream because you can’t do that at a kosher restaurant.

It was great.

And it was surprising to see Lauren eat red meat.

But she did.

So we walked around the Jewish area for a bit, and then we walked to the Pantheon.

It was huge, much bigger than I expected.

We did a self-guided tour there.

They give you smartphones with the tour on them, and you tap a thing, and then you can listen to a person talk about it.

The problem is the person talks too slowly.

As a podcast listener, I like to be able to press the 1.5x button or the 1.75x button.

And this person would talk slowly.

So it was cool, and it was really interesting to learn more stuff about the Pantheon.

I kind of want to go there when it rains sometime.

But it was great.

Then we got gelato at Piazza Navona, a cool plaza.

We also got alcohol.

I don’t remember what it was, but I wrote in my notes we had gelato and alcohol.

We weren’t actually hungry, but we needed a bathroom, and this was the easiest way to get one.

Then we walked to another piazza, Piazza del Corso, which was a big town square with huge churches and sculptures.

We walked along Via del Corso, which to us at least was a lot like Rodeo Drive with tons of overpriced designer stores.

Then we climbed the Spanish Steps, which is 10 million steps that separated two plazas.

From there we walked to the Trevi Fountain, which you may have heard of.

It’s a huge fountain.

Then we walked to dinner where we shared pizza and pasta.

That was day two.

I thought maybe I would cover day three, but I don’t think so.

The only other thing I can say we did on that day two was after dinner, we’d already hit like a bajillion steps, but Lauren’s like, we should go out one more time.

We should go look at Circus Maximus, Circus Maximus, where the Romans did chariot racing.

We did.

It wasn’t really open anymore, but the whole thing was outdoors.

We just walked over to it and walked all around and saw it.

It was cool.

The funniest thing to me about every, and you’ll hear this again and again as I go through the trip, was how we just did so much on foot.

There were times where we could have taken a car.

We’re like, yeah, we’ll just walk because we figured this way we can eat all the pizza and pasta we want and not worry about it because we’re getting a million steps, which was basically true.

But yeah, that was day two.

The next day, the day I’m going to get to do tomorrow is where we leave Rome and go to Florence.

And it’s my first time on a true high speed train in Europe.

Good stuff.

Lex.