Return to Rome

IN every memory I have of Rome, the sun is always shining and it always seems to be hot. It's certainly true of the first time I visited the city.

IN every memory I have of Rome, the sun is always shining and it always seems to be hot. It's certainly true of the first time I visited the city in June 2003, when I stayed for several weeks with a friend who had been posted to the city for his job.

His employer had provided him with a nice apartment just near Piazza del Popolo. It was summer; I was on holidays and my friend was at work during the day so I spent a large amount of time just walking around and exploring the city without a set itinerary or, on some days, even a guidebook. And as I wasn't accustomed to the art of the siesta I would often be walking about in the hottest part of the day - also coincidentally the quietest - and would sometimes wander into a museum or church just to get out of the heat. It's the sort of sightseeing you can do only when you appear to have a limitless amount of time in a city.

As I get older I'm finding that my holidays are getting shorter and I worry that if I don't have an agenda each day then I am possibly wasting my holiday. (Want to win a luxury holiday for two to Rome? See below.) These days I mostly find myself in foreign cities for work, and on those occasions my sightseeing is usually done in stolen moments between appointments.

The best thing about visiting a city for the second, third or fourth time is that you don't feel the need to see the sights, and you don't need to plan out every waking hour to reap as much out of your time there. So when you find that you have three hours to kill before your next meeting you can take your time getting there and just go for a walk. On our trip to produce this Rome issue of WISH, I was surprised by how familiar the city seemed to me, even though I hadn't been there for nearly 10 years. I could take a cursory glance at a map and if something was within walking distance I would take off in the general direction, confident that I could get there without getting lost. That stay in Rome was last November and it was cold and wet, which normally wouldn't bother me. However, one of the things we had to do on this trip was produce the fashion shoot for the March issue (see the video above). Our photographer, James Cant, fashion director Ken Thompson and I had the idea of producing a shoot that conveyed the spirit of Rome in the summer months.

Yes, we know we were faking it doing it in November, but a blue sky is a blue sky. Except, of course, when it's very dark grey and pouring with rain. The day before the shoot we spent hours trawling weather websites hoping we'd find a different forecast. In the end we gave up and came up with a new concept, basing ourselves in a suite at the Hotel Hassler. Necessity is the mother of all invention and so it was with this shoot; what we got in the end far exceeded our original idea.

We couldn't have produced this issue without the very generous support of Singapore Airlines, which got us there in superb comfort, and The Leading Hotels of the World for making sure our on-the-ground experience was just as commodious. For the first time since we started these Destination Issues, we are offering you the chance to win a similar experience to the one we had. Pick up the magazine (free with metro editions of The Australian on Friday, March 1, 2013) to find out how to enter our Roman Holiday promotion to win two business-class tickets to Rome on Singapore Airlines and two nights' accommodation at both the Hotel Regina Baglioni and the Aldrovandi Villa Borghese.

We hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as we did producing it. We welcome your feedback at facebook.com/wishmagazine.

The March edition of WISH magazine is free with metro editions of The Australian on Friday, March 1.