transit and my lucky map

Here is my lucky map of Rome. The hotel had these on a tear-away-pad, and I must have used about 5 or 6. But this one...oh boy. My roomie, Don, decided he wanted to get back to Florence right away, so he hopped the 1030 train from across the street for 38 euros, while I opted to wait for our 4pm bus ride, which I had already paid for. We had to get out of the room by 10am, otherwise they get upset. We had moved out and said our good-byes, when I realized I needed to go back and do one more thing. So, needing reading material, I grabbed this map we had left behind on our night stand, and when I opened it up, a 20 euro note dropped out. AWESOME! This map had been used by at least three people the night before as we got lost in the area of some discos (more on that elsewhere). So the chances of the 20 being someone else's were high. But the chances of it being mine now, even higher.

My 3-day transit ticket. We all paid 11 euro for the ticket the first morning and then rode the subway (only two lines, A and B) to the next stop and got off to walk the rest of the way to Unidroit, as well as the Constitutional Court. Many of my (short sighted) classmates complained that we wasted 11 euros on these tickets. But, with that ticket, we could hop any subway, any bus for three days and not worry about change, money or whether it was still good. I used it from that first morning up to my via Ottaviano experience solid. I got my 11 euros out of that ticket. If you are spending a short time in Rome, this is the ticket (so to say) to flexible intracity travel. Rome is much dirtier than Florence. It also smells a little worse and has more areas where my Sketch-O-Meter was pegged at 90. There were clean up crews moving at all hours, but like magic, they could never stay ahead of the garbage, bottles, and crud that always had the upper hand. The closer to the train station, the stronger the smell. Fortunately, there is not much in the way of touristy sights within a 3 block radius. Just my hotel.