Winding up our trip — and a visit to Rome!

On our final morning at the agriturismo in Tuscany, before we left for Rome, we decided to have a nice big breakfast there at La Pietriccia. I loved the fact you could get freshly squeezed pear juice, and I can see just a bit of mine in this photo! Not realizing what other goodies awaited, I selected from the buffet thin slices of the cheese and meat so central to Italian meals, a plum, and what I thought was biscotti with some of my beloved Nutella. I soon learned that the packaged "biscotti" was melba toast, so that didn't exactly work with the Nutella!

No worries, though. Soon, to our table comes this magnificent array of breakfast breads. Alex and I just laughed, and he wondered how many guests this would feed at teatime!

Oh, I do love croissants, and I definitely ate my share of them on this trip! It's probably best I never learn to make them …

So when we finally arrived in Rome, we barely had time for another hop-on, hop-off bus tour. (Yes, we know. We tried to do too much on this trip!) At any rate, at least we can say we have seen the Colosseum!

As with so many of the major attractions in Europe, we learned we should have booked tickets online if we wanted to avoid spending several hours (in the rain!) waiting to go inside the Colosseum. We just didn't have that kind of time, and frankly, we both agreed we wouldn't have waited in line if we'd had the time. (I'm not sure there's a perfect solution for the line-averse traveler. If there is, I'd love to hear it!)

The other highlight of our time in Rome was seeing St. Peter's Square. Next time I'm watching on television as the Pope gives a speech there, I'll have a feel for what the square looks like!

The city's incredible architecture, I must say, left me with a bit of an inferiority complex about the U.S. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but … our old buildings just aren't quite as grand, are they!

I have a dear friend who is a devout Catholic, so I had to pop in a shop near the Vatican and buy her a few items while I was there. And this is out of the norm for me, but I wanted an Italian-looking cup and saucer to take home with me, so I was delighted to find this one in the gift shop. It definitely says "Italy" to me!

And since you all are devout tea lovers, I figured that one of you would enjoy this little book of Italian biscotti recipes featuring cute teatime artwork! When I Google-translated the title, here's what I got: "Small manual biscuit Italian ingredients, good and fantasy." Make of it what you will, but I just loved all the cute tea illustrations and figured it shouldn't be too hard to translate a recipe.

This one is, I believe, for Rosemary Biscotti. So to thank you for joining me on my travels, I'm giving away this little cookbook to someone who leaves a comment between now and 7 a.m. EST on Monday, June 2. Good luck — and thanks again for reading along!