I came to Rome to celebrate New Year. We didn’t coordinate it, but by pure coincidence, so did lots of other people. And here I was thinking winter would be off-season. Silly me…

Having spent the strike of midnight on the field of Circus Maximus (together with 30,000 others) and bought a bottle of spomante from an enterprising vendor at Colosseum after that, my travel companion and I slept in on January 1st, but then vended our way slowly towards the Vatican.

The best thing about Rome is that it is shock-full of beauty. Roaming its streets is a delight. Every corner you turn, every alleyway you head down on a whim, there is more architectural grandeur and dizzying history on display than you can find anywhere else. Villas, palazzi, churches and roman ruins are everywhere. The Jewish quarter and Trastevere stand out, but it really doesn’t matter where you go, it’s all a feast for your eyes.

One of my absolute favourites was Palazzo Spada – sumptuous home of a cardinal who clearly was a man of the world, as the house is decorated with friezes depicting lusty fauns and nymphs. Not content with a giant house with adjoining gardens, the good cardinal also used mathematics and other tricks to create optical illusions to further improve the grandeur of his home. The distance from the woman to the statue at the other end of this colonnade?

Considerably less than ten meters. Really. It is. Tricky bugger.

When we finally got to the Catholic centre of the universe it seemed most of the city was gathered in the piazza. We had planned to see St Peter, but instead we got to hang with his present replacement, Franciscus, who spoke to the crowds from his balcony.

I have no idea what he was on about (bad sound and Italian conspiring against me), but the devout roared its approval, and he insisted on being in a selfie with me, so I guess he is a likable guy.

Second window from the right, top level: Pope.

The various other popes have certainly left their mark on the rest of the city as well over the centuries: every other edifice seems to have been adorned with their names, more often than not combined with the medieval equivalent of a papal graffiti tag – who knew their collective rap name was P-Max?!

The only institution that is possibly more venerable in Rome than the Pope (at least according to foodies) is Alfredo, the birthplace of fettuccine Alfredo, so that’s where we headed next. The walls are filled with portraits of famous patrons, and the atmosphere of religious raptness that falls over the dining room whenever the head waiter rolls out his little trolley to perform the mixing of the fettuccine and the Parmesan is no less magical (sorry, wonderous) than the miracle priests perform when turning bread and wine into the body of Christ.

Is it good? Yes. Undoubtedly. The pasta is done to perfection, the Parmesan (aged two years) is powerful yet subtle, and since carbs don’t count when on holiday we have a large portion each. And yet I can’t help but feel that it is really nothing more than really fancy mac ‘n’ cheese.

Be that as it may, others have noted before me that the strength of the Italian kitchen lies not in the complexity of its dishes, but the superior quality of its ingredients and the masterful way in which they are combined; that is certainly true at Alfredo’s, but also in virtually every other eatery we encounter. We have delicious melanzane parmigiana in modest neighbourhoods, we find the best tiramisu in the world in a hole-in-the-wall called Pompi (the queue runs into the street at all times during the day) – if it hadn’t been for one evening when we had what can only be described as a Fawlty Towers experience (where the serving staff would appear at random intervals with orders that no one recognized as theirs, thus putting the wait in waiter), it would have been a perfect score. As it was, we hiked over 20 kilometers per day and I’m still convinced we racked up a calorific surplus…!