Even though we’re fresh off an eleven-day, two-country, seven-city journey, I want to hop back in time a month and a half ago to our move to our new neighborhood before those memories lose their crispness.

After touching down from Morocco at 8:30pm, we immediately shifted into transition mode, as our new apartment lease in the Salario neighborhood had already begun, and our old one in Celio was ending at 1pm the following day. We went straight from the airport to the new place to deposit our bags, eat a quick dinner, and rest up for the move.

The next morning was a hectic flurry of dropping Emi off at school and then shuttling back and forth between apartments, moving boxes and suitcases via taxi and the metro (sometimes in Rome it’s faster to travel by subway than car), and cleaning out the old apartment for check-out. After playing real-life Tetris with our remaining boxes and a large cab, we bade farewell to the Celio apartment we’ll always have fond memories of, and drove off to Salario to start the next chapter of our time in Rome.

Salario sits north of and just outside the Aurelian Walls, the 3rd-century ancient walls that surround the old core of Rome. Our apartment is a block from the gate of Porta Pia, where the Italian army breached the walls in 1870 to complete the unification of Italy, and across the street from the Colonna della Victoria, which commemorates the event.

Salario’s differences from Celio have pros and cons. It’s much more “modern” by Roman standards, though mostly in the sense that it’s not strewn with millennia-old ruins. Celio was wonderful because every day I would walk the streets and get an instant, Colosseo-shaped reminder that yes, we were truly living in Rome now, and that we were here amidst all that history. Its proximity to a major tourist site also meant that at least some English was pretty widely spoken by most people living and working nearby. Celio would probably not have been an ideal home for the length of time we’ll be here though.

Salario is much more of a real Roman neighborhood than Celio; English is much less of a sure thing, as you’d expect away from the major tourist draws, and for every souvenir or tourism business you’d find in Celio, there’s a hardware, housewares, or grocery store.

One of the things we want while we’re here is to really experience the culture, and that can be made difficult when your lack of language skills are constantly being enabled, and also when the majority of the businesses in the vicinity are either restaurants (not a bad thing), or tourism-related (not so great). Also, as the weather warms up, the tourist hordes will only grow until they peak mid-summer. While our actual apartment was a couple blocks from the heavy tourist traffic, it still gets weary dealing with all of them after a couple months.

Life on the other side of the walls is different, mostly for the better. While it’s still challenging at times to find everyday things you take for granted when Target exists, we’re able to find most things we need in walking distance due to the more residential nature of the area. The food options are much better in our new neighborhood, too, as the local restaurants can’t rely on the steady stream of Colosseo-goers to keep their tables full. Plus, no tourist restaurants nearby means I haven’t had to endure a single busker’s accordion rendition of Despacito outside our window since we moved, which is truly not an issue that I’d ever imagined needing to worry about just a year ago.

We’re much closer to Emilia’s school now, which isn’t a coincidence; we’d picked it in part based on proximity to this apartment. It wasn’t close to our old place though, which meant a 45-minute public transit commute each way to drop her off for about a month before we moved. Now, it’s less than a 20-minute walk each way, which isn’t nothing, but isn’t the disruption to your day that 90 minutes on a tram is.

Finally, we no longer have Colle Oppio park a quick walk away, but now the drastically larger and objectively better Villa Borghese is just over a 10-minute walk away. Villa Borghese, which I’ve mentioned briefly before, is the Roman answer to New York’s Central Park: a massive, green oasis amid the chaos that is Rome. Aside from ample green spaces, Borghese is home to several museums, a zoo, restaurants and cafes, a small lake with rowboats for rent, a handful of smallish carnival-type rides, separate movie theaters for adults and children, rentals of all sorts (bikes, Segways, inline skates, you name it), an amphitheater, and some of the best views of the city. We’ve been taking advantage of being in its vicinity, and I have no doubt we’ll do so increasingly as the weather continues perking up.

After over a month here, we’re starting to feel like we’ve gotten into as much of a groove as we’ll likely get, with our travel and visitor plans likely to keep things from ever staying too static before we return stateside. We’re regulars at our favorite neighborhood restaurants and such, including the Sicilian pasticceria down the street that we’re probably a little TOO regular at. Our neighbors are very friendly, own our favorite pizza joint across the street, and have twin girls Emilia’s age, who Emi enjoys playing with despite a pretty stark lack of language overlap.

Elsewhere in news of stuff we’ve been up to, we recently attended our first European soccer match. Rome is home to two teams in Serie A, Italy’s top soccer league: AS Roma and Lazio. The rivalry between the two is pretty intense. As my in-laws had already gifted me an AS Roma scarf for Christmas, my loyalty had already been purchased. I probably would’ve chosen them anyway, as I like that “Roma” is part of their name, and I dig their uniforms more; they look like if Gryffindor played in Serie A.

Anyway, we settled on Roma vs. Napoli, which was a poor decision, since Roma got tossed around like a rag doll. Final score, 4–1, Napoli. Yikes, still fun though. Plus, Emi enjoyed waving her souvenir flag and experimenting with 5-year-old fan taunts, like “Sneeze on Napoli!” after she had, in fact, sneezed. Hopefully we can take in another game or two while we’re out here.

Starting in just over a week, we’ll be hosting guests and/or traveling with pretty intense frequency, so I’ll have to figure out how to streamline my writing and photo editing to keep up. Ciao for now!