The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why I chose Rome as my first trip of 2021
After nearly two years, Anna Hart ventures abroad and falls in love afresh with city breaks
How do you choose your first overseas holiday since March last year? For me, my first trip of 2021 was always going to be an Italian city break. At various times in my life when I’ve found myself in a funk – ground down by the bleak British winter, work or relationship woes – a grand Italian city has come to my rescue, administering a reliable dose of fantastic food, fabulousness, fun and frivolity.
Naples, Florence, Milan, Venice and Bologna are very different cities, but equally generous with their charms, and the combination of melodramatic architecture, artfully designed hotels, comfort food and comfort wine never fails to lift my spirits. Italians make a big deal out of everything, so I never feel embarrassed showing up in Italy with a self-pitying sigh. Thailand is rubbish for this (you have to pretend everything is great the whole time) while Sweden and Denmark aren’t ideal destinations for overemotional divas either.
But I have faith that whatever state I arrive in, Italy will listen and nod sympathetically. It will just nod the once, however, then thrust a plate of pasta into my hands and proceed to show me how fabulous life truly is. Perfect.
And yet the grandest Italian city in the gang – Rome – has so far eluded me. It’s embarrassing to admit, as a travel writer, that I’ve never been. But even the most dedicated travellers can name a city they have consistently failed to visit, despite true intentions to go “one day”. Mine was Rome. Friends and colleagues told me I’d love it, and I knew they weren’t wrong – but Rome never felt quite as urgent as some other trip. Perhaps because it is such a classic destination, an “unmissable” European capital, I became complacent, and therefore did miss it, finding myself instead in Warsaw, Ljubljana and Split.
Or perhaps I was saving Rome for a time when I really needed high-octane fabulousness. I’m glad I did, because I’m writing this column after three glorious days in Rome, three days of revelling in the extravagant delights of the city just as Anita Ekberg revels in the Trevi Fountain. And Rome has worked. I feel happier than I have in months, reset and restored. For my bespoke portfolio of post-lockdown blues, Rome is the perfect prescription.
Everything in Rome is enormous and extravagant, from the Colosseum (the clue is in the name, Anna) to the platefuls of pasta at Trattoria da Danilo (trattoriadadanilo.com). I am staying at the new Hoxton Rome (thehoxton.com), minutes away from Villa Borghese. It’s a decadently designed hotel where every detail dazzles, from the Murano
glass chandeliers to the marble-topped credenza (a showy Italian sideboard) where I hung my summer dresses – still perfectly weather-appropriate.
Rome’s extravagance has been a good influence on me, because I had quite enough of frugality and simplicity during that dreary winter lockdown. I’d also forgotten the delicious pleasure of wandering around an unfamiliar city, slack-jawed with awe, dazzled by difference; how I have missed difference. And difference is something we are not lacking on the European continent.
It took a two-year work stint in New Zealand to make me realise quite how spoilt European travellers are. I sat on a four-hour flight from Auckland to Melbourne, only to reach a city not culturally dissimilar from… Auckland. I understood why my London-based Antipodean friends craved weekends away around Europe; I realised how uniquely fortunate European travellers are to have this buffet of wildly varied international flavours spread out before us. A two-hour train journey brings you to a completely different culture, cuisine, landscape and language.
With restrictions easing in most European countries, and testing now cheaper and simpler, it feels like the perfect time to plot trips to unmissable European cities we have managed to miss. And autumn and winter are brilliant months for European city breaks.
“In Rome we have a saying that, by the middle of May, we are already looking forward to September,” says Annie Ojile, who runs Scooteroma (scooteroma.com) and gave me a street art tour of San Lorenzo on her Vespa. “Rome is insanely hot and crowded in the summer; you are here at just the right time, petal.” So if you feel the easing of travel restrictions and protocols is too late, that you have missed out on European holidays in 2021, think again. I’m not quite finished feasting on Rome, but a whole European buffet awaits.