Vulnerable. That’s how we felt. We’d never been to Rome before and hardly understood the lingo.

Still, we knew enough to avoid the seedy types who lunged at us crying “Taxi! Taxi!” when we stumbled through customs under the influence of 24 hours’ jet lag. We kept our heads, wheeled our bags to the rank outside and climbed into the cab at the front of the queue.

The driver had grey hair and what I imagined to be trustworthy blue eyes. When my husband asked in his best Italian if he would drive us to the port, Civitavecchia, the driver readily agreed.

A disappointing aspect of international travel these days is the world looks identical in so many places. We drove past signs for Hyundai, Goodyear and Kia. The motorway was lined with pretty pink shrubs whose name I can’t remember, but are seen everywhere in Auckland over summer.

The taxi driver was similar to one you’d find in Christchurch or Hamilton, apart from the fact his rear vision mirror was at a jaunty angle and his sunglasses were darker and more stylish than average. He spoke not a word of English.

“Aren’t you glad,” I said to my husband. “We didn’t go with one of those crooks in the arrival hall?”

Rain speckled the windscreen as we drove past hay bales the shape of Swiss rolls and orangey apartment blocks with terracotta roofs.

Italians have a healthy attitude to cars. Immune to the allure of four wheel drive tanks, they prefer vehicles not much bigger than Matchbox toys. It’s how they drive them that’s scary.

We hurtled through tunnels and toll gates that looked about 40 years old. When I mentioned to my husband the journey was taking longer than expected he assured me it was a 72km trip.

When we finally arrived in the confusing mess of ships, cranes and buildings that is Civitavecchia our cruise liner was nowhere to be seen. The taxi driver negotiated a spaghetti of roads, stopped several times to ask directions and managed to find it.

“The man’s a saint,” I said to my husband as we unloaded our bags.

We asked the driver to write his fare on a notepad. My husband turned almost as pale as the paper.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as the taxi drove away.

“He charged triple what it said on his metre,” he said.

With several hours to kill before we could board Nautica we found a café in which to drink coffee the texture of tomato soup.

A leather faced woman in a black mini dress and fishnet stockings clopped toward us on a pair of towering stilettos. On her barely concealed right breast a rose the size of a dishcloth was tattooed. A dog of dubious ancestry trotted at her side.

She sat at the table next to ours, lit a cigarette and shouted into her cell phone. A younger woman in spray on jeans decorated with a garish gold belt arrived to keep her company.

Behind them sat an old man in a fisherman’s cap. His face was so badly deformed he resembled a kumera.

A black car pulled up and disgorged three fat guys in sunglasses and bad suits. The bloke with a gold hoop in his left ear exuded authority. After a brief visit to the café owner they drove off, nearly running over a man preening himself in front of his Vespa’s rear view mirror.

“If this was a short film it would never get made,” my husband said. “People would say the characters are too overdrawn to be realistic.”

Almost on queue an elderly hunchbacked woman tottered into the café. One of her legs, which were thin as toothpicks, was wrapped in bandages. Her frock was outrageously floral. When she spoke it sounded as if a parrot was being throttled.

Her friend was larger and more demure in a blue patterned dress and crimson cardigan. She wore a gold crucifix and the sort of large framed spectacles that haven’t been around since 1970.

The two old girls shot a poisonous look in our direction, but it wasn’t for us. Their disdain was targeted at the tarty women who had just been joined by a man in a leather jacket and far too much flashy jewellery.

Fortunately, the old women’s attention was diverted by a man with an Alsatian that resembled a moth eaten lion.

“Arrivederci!” the hunchback croaked as we left.

We must have been strange enough to belong.