Roma, my love!

This city gets millions of visitors each year: old couples, groups of giggling girls, school classes, newly-weds, Christians waiting for their chance to meet the Pope...The list is endless, I know. And still, it got me. Completely!
There is nothing to be said which has not been said some hundred times before, or some travel guide has mentioned previously. So I won´t comment on St.Peters Square, Forum Romanum or the Trevi Fountain. Of course, I had to see it all, and especially Piazza Navona will stay with me. But after some hours with screaming kids and huge tourist-hordes, I needed some quietness.
And that is probably where Rome has surprised me entirely. You just have to steer away from the stream of people, seek yourself in to a tiny, mostly darkened alley with a bredth of three meter or less and you got some room to breathe. You´re not alone, but it is italian phrases, instead of loud american bawling (sorry, I don´t mean to offend all Americans, just the ones I heard clearly some hundred meter ahead of me), German nonsense (hey, I´m German and I can behave!) or French tittering.
Romans have a reputation for just saying whatever comes into their mind, and even with my very limited knowledge of the Italian language, I could understand what it meant.
And finding those little islands of good taste in a place full of tourists traps is worth the hours of traffic noise and illegal sellers jumping at you every corner. Cause, have you found a ristorante with those magnificent pasta and pizza-courses, where the whole wine-cellar is positioned on the wall above your table, and the first that meets you is a basket with warm bread and some bottles of olive-oil, then you see, taste and smell what Rome is beyond the Colosseum and the Vatican.
But there is so much more: the marked at Campo de Fiori, where I went as often as possible, just to buy a bag of tomatoes which I ate right away (and earned some strange looks from both tourists and locals); or the night life at Trastevere, where you get your head-banging Peroni (my warning to you all, never more than one bottle at a time) in a tiny pub and drink it outside with some three dozen strangers in the streets; the take-away pizza-shops near Piazza Republica, the cats at Argentina and the shops at Via del Corso.
I could go on of course, but my heart is in those tiny alleys and the cosy restaurant somewhere hidden in the vast array of what Rome represents. I will come back for sure, but this first impression of the city is one of the most breathtaking a place has left me with.