A weekend in Rome.

A spontaneous weekend in Rome… with a surprise guest appearance.✨

After our honeymoon in 2019, we were feeling a bit blue. So we booked a last-minute trip to Rome. Just us and a very aggressive food schedule.

We hit the classics: the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Vatican City. But this time around, entering the Vatican felt… different. Security scanners, metal detectors, fences everywhere. It wasn’t like this when I was there in 2010.

Has the world just gotten more paranoid?

Inside the Vatican area, the crowd gathered. Some very official-looking figure stepped up and started speaking. The people around us were moved.

We whispered to each other:

“Wait… is that… could it be…?”

“No way. Can’t be.”

Naturally, we Googled the pope, held up a photo, squinted into the distance…

It was him.

The actual pope.

So yeah—basically hung out with the pope that day.

(From like… several hundred meters away. But still.)

This painting is the view over Rome—pasta-fueled, sun-drenched, and full of the kind of surprises that happen when you say yes to a spontaneous trip.