Roman Mornings

Sezane dress
Jonak heels (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Shop Chelsea King barrette (c/o) (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)  (similar)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II – Rome, Italy

It’s no secret that I’m an early riser. I love the sun, from the earliest moments after it comes up each day. And I love the quiet of the world before everyone else wakes to fill it with chatter and car horns. Even on vacation, I get up around six in the morning. To me, that’s the best time to really enjoy a new place. And the added bonus, of course, is that you often get to enjoy it without having to share it.

Roman mornings are magical, but they’re different from Parisian mornings. It’s wonderful to get out early; to walk the streets with no one but the few locals on their way to an early shift or church service. But all you can do is get out. It’s a rare cafe that sets up to serve coffee before nine o’clock, so the quiet early morning cafe breakfast we so often savour in the French capital wasn’t an option. As we settled into our Roman morning routine, we would have a quick hot beverage at home – tea for me; I’m not really a coffee drinker, although I do make exceptions in Italy – before dashing out to take a walk and get some photos. After, we’d come home again, usually for a second hot drink and some breakfast, before getting on with our day… which, admittedly, often involved more photos.

I love my routines, but on holiday, in a new place where life works differently, I’m happy to let them go temporarily. Sometimes, a routine that works in one city simply doesn’t make sense in another – and our Parisian morning rituals didn’t really fit with the Roman way of life. That’s part of the fun of discovering new places, at least for me; learning how to live in them. But it took me a while to really get a sense of what my Roman routine would look like, and just when I was starting to settle in, it was time to come home again. I needed another week of Roman mornings, at least, to get the hang of being Roman rather than Parisian.

…which is not to say that we plan to rush back to Rome for another holiday. We don’t, at least I don’t think so at this point. (I almost never say never; life is full of surprises.) But I’d prefer not to wait ten years between visits again, either. So much changes in a decade – ourselves, most notably – that it never really feels like you’re back in a place you know, even if everything looks familiar, after such a long time. For one thing, I wasn’t yet an early riser on my last visit to Rome. I’d never seen the city before eight am, and knew nothing of the enchantment of it at that time.

The almost secret peace of Rome in the mornings is one of my favourite things about the city. It was the morning that we snapped this photos that I first experienced it and fell in love.

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