UK and Med Cruise - Day 20 - 24 September - Rome

Terrible night's sleep last night unfortunately, because we needed to get up quite early today - we needed to up and ready to leave and get to our assigned onboard meeting place by 7:10am.  I had booked a shuttle ride for 9am to go back to Rome.  Princess is so very definite that you won't be allowed off the ship until it's your turn, and of course we also had to pick up our suitcases once we got off the ship, and go through customs.  I had no idea how long all of this might take, which is why I asked for a 7am to 8am departure.
Anyway, we got to the meeting place at around 7am only to be told that we could leave straight away if we wanted to.  No chance of that; we sat around in the lounge until closer to 8am.  Turns out that the disembarkation was going really quickly; while we were there they started calling for people who were still on board to come to their departure areas 30 minutes earlier than planned.  Once we got off the ship we realised at least part of the reason that it was going so well - the customs check involved walking out past a sign that said that if you had anything to declare, you should declare it.  And, no immigration check at all.
Bye-bye Royal Princess:

So we wandered out thinking that we were going to be really early, but the shuttle driver arrived quite early and all eight passengers showed up early too (and just to keep the numbers up, at least half the passengers in the shuttle were Australian; I still have no idea why there would have been so many Aussies - and Kiwis for that matter - on this cruise). This was a far less dramatic drive than the shuttle transfer to the port at the start of the trip - for a start, this guy used hands-free for his phone.  It ended up taking quite a long time to get to the hotel; one of the people wanted to be dropped off at the airport, and of course we were all being dropped at different hotels.  The big delay was caused by a fire though; some of the main streets in the centre of the city were temporarily closed off by the police and fire brigade.
We got to our hotel hours early - at around 10:30am - and by a miracle our room was ready and they let us check in straight away!
So, we got ourselves sorted out and then went out to have a look at the Colosseum:

and had a quick, early lunch at a cafe.
We have also managed to buy our three day Metro passes - which let you use most of the trains, trams and busses - and went on a couple of Metro rides just to make sure that we know how it all works.  This might sound a bit anal, but we actually need to take the Metro to the starting point of our tour tomorrow, and I didn't want to have to deal with working this all out early on a Sunday morning.
I'm very happy with both hotels we have stayed in; the prices were quite reasonable by Rome standards and the rooms have all we need, including far more space than you'd get in a similar hotel in London for example, and air-conditioning (although that was deliberate; air conditioning was a non-negotiable part of my search for these hotels!