I’ve bought my share of guidebooks, yeah, and have been studying them. What’s made the best reading, though, are the two older books linked over there on the right – A Traveller in Rome and A Companion Guide to Rome. The Morton is quite wonderful – His walks around Rome, historical asides and discourses, encounters with the locals, are all beautifully told and, I’m thinking, still relevant 50 years or so on. Particularly memorable to me are his accounts of a meeting with Pius XII at Castel Gondolfo, and his wanderings in Vatican City. It’s lovely.

But as for my specific thinking on this trip, I’ve depended far more on websites than guidebooks. What websites – especially travel discussions forums – offer is, first of all, personal experiences – good and bad! They also give you the chance to specifically search for information you need, nagging questions about the bus transportation system or Roman grocery stores or markets that the guidebooks don’t answer.

Exhibit A is the Slow Travel website – oriented, obviously, for those who like longer stays, rather than 5-cities-in-7-days. The discussion boards are quite interesting and substantial, even if, every few days, they inspire another round of nervousness on my part – the past week it’s been a thread on giving exact change and how irritated some shopkeepers are if you don’t. Great. One more thing.

Here’s an indicator of the Times We Live In: through that board, I’ve "met" not one but two other families with small children who will be on the flight we’re on to Rome. Hey! Avoid that flight! It might get noisy!

The Slow Travel site is also filled with pages that contain very practical, step by step tips to the little things that might confuse you: understanding the caffe menu; how to deal with the 1-Euro/deposit thing for shopping carts and self-serve produce weighing in the supermarkets; what the bus tickets and ticket-takers look like and how to use them.

Yeah, little things, but you know, when you’re traveling with little one, you want to be as prepared as you possibly can, especially on the bus!

So…body and soul. Spirit and practicality…trying to get it all together here.

Here’s one more nugget (thanks to Roaming Roman) – George Weigel’s chapter on the Scavi excavations from Letters to a Young Catholic, which I’ll have my daughter read before we go down…