This Is Serious!

Clearly things were getting serious now and it was time to leave Italy sooner rather than later. People had told us that Doha was already closed to planes from Italy but luckily we had booked our tickets via a local travel agent rather than doing it online ourselves. I made a phone call to our agent and then after a short series of emails she told us that she had booked us on a return flight for tomorrow. Much simpler than the ladies on the train who had done all their own bookings. Because of Covid19 major airlines including Qatar were waiving the rebooking fee so the change wasn't going to cost us anything. The agent said there were flights on several days and we decided to take the earliest one despite it being on Friday 13th. I'm not generally superstitious and I figured so much has gone wrong in the world already that hopefully Friday 13th is now working in reverse.

We had booked our Rome apartment through to Saturday but at this stage everything was changing so fast and often I figured we'd keep the booking open because I wasn't going to believe things were assured until my feet were firmly on Australian soil again.

Trajan's Column which was there in Edward's time and Vittoriano which wasn't. The latter was built as a memorial to Italys unification in the late 19th century.  

We cooked breakfast before going for a short walk. Today, however, the police were taking the lockdown seriously and a passing police patrol made it clear that we should return home. Luckily we had bought sufficient supplies for a couple of days because by now Rome really was a ghost town with all restaurants and shops closed except for mini marts which only seem to sell potato crisps and limoncello. They really love their limoncello here.

So we returned to our apartment where we spent the rest of the day watching The Simpsons on TV. We cooked tea and drank champagne for tea. The train to the airport was still running but we decided in the circumstances it would be safer to book a shuttle service the apartment uses to get to the airport tomorrow.