Roman Ramblings- Piazza Navona

 A little known fact about me is that Rome is my favorite city (city, not place. My favorite place is Sicily).  It's a place I know very well, and always enjoy revisiting no matter how many times I've been there.  Rome is a great city to explore alone as well since the street plan is really simple and efficient.  Most if the city is a traditional Roman grid plan, so it's easy to follow a map an find what you're looking for.  In cities like Paris or Dublin with winding streets that branch off at weird angles I always have trouble finding things.

My favorite area of Rome is Piazza Navona.  During the day it's very cheesy with tourists crowding around the Four Rivers fountain and grabbing gelato or browsing trinket stands, but at night I find it to be entirely different. The main area will still have some tourists at night and the restaurants surrounding the piazza are perhaps a bit less authentic than you might be looking for, but if you venture onto the surrounding streets, you'll find the energy that makes me love the area.  

Parallel to the actual piazza is Via Santa Maria dell'Anima, which is a small street that houses all types of different bars and bizarre shops selling candy, toys, novelties etc.  Via dell'Anima has just about every bar you could want, and sometimes I even forget that I'm in Rome when I explore this street.  There's many different areas for nightlife in Rome and each of them offer different types of vibes but Navona has the most variety for the types of places that I like. Yes Testaccio has more clubs, there's chic places like La Maison (I wasn't a fan) by the Spanish Steps, there's more low key pubs over in Palatino, but Navona has the vibrancy.  I always feel like I'm in a carnival land or something.  One night in an Irish Pub there (and several rounds of cocktails in) I actually forgot that I was in Italy since it seems so bizarre to find an Irish pub there and then step outside back into the balmy air and see the warm stone colors all around you. 

The above card photos show one of my favorite souvenirs from my travels in Rome.  I actually keep this card in my wallet till this day because it's just so silly and makes me happy.  If you read it you can see that the club theme is "Screw Global Recession" and one of the available drinks is the "Jager Obama Bomb".  This for me sums up why I love Piazza Navona, it's just such an odd little area!

The piazza is just across the street from Campo de Fiori which I also like but not as much as Navona.  I always recommend this area to people when they ask me where to stay in Rome.  This is where I prefer to stay and aside from being in the area itself, you're really close to everything and just about as ideally central as you can get, which makes most of the sites easily within walking distance.  Oddly, I have no photos of Piazza Navona!  That's due to the fact that every time I'm there I'm having way too much fun (and too many drinks) to be thinking about taking pictures!