It appears I left a little something off my cool stuff list. Rome.

I arrived in the city with a mate by way of Tiburtina, one of its outer suburbs, which is possibly the most unsavoury place on earth. We hid from the gypsy beggars and other assorted riffraff in the relative safety of the bookshop until our train arrived.

The metro wasn’t much better: too scared to touch the handrails of the train for fear of contracting hepatitis, we felt that skidding and sliding all over the carriage was preferable. By the time we popped up at Spagna - the Spanish steps - we were bursting for a lungful of nice, clean, fresh…Roman smog.

But it was such a beautiful sunny day, and to add to the top-notchness of the place, everybody was pottering about with four-tiered gelato cones - schoolkids, on-duty police, businessmen. Indeed, Italians have a seemingly endless capacity to down gelato at any hour while loitering on the steps of famous and historically significant monuments. As a fond tribute to Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’, we bought peppermint gelatos but no sooner had we licked our first lick when we were promptly told by an Italian policeman there was to be no eating there, presumably to avoid getting random slivers of unidentified drool all over their beloved Spanish steps.

They do it all the time in the movies…