MY friend Lynne and I last got away for a break together, free from work, home, husbands and children, two years ago.

We decided it was time for another. We escaped to Rome for three nights and planned to while away the hours over red wine and plates of pasta in cobbled back streets, after soaking up culture in galleries, churches and ancient ruins.

What we hadn’t bargained for was how long it would take us to find the right Roma football shirts for our sports-mad 15 and 16-year-old sons, as two days before we arrived, Roma had beaten Barcelona to reach the Champions League semi-final, and so merchandise was selling out fast.

“Don’t buy cheap replicas from tourist stores, they’re rubbish,” Lynne’s husband Steve texted. “Make sure you get the official merchandise,” my husband cautioned.

So, in between viewing Caravaggios, Michelangelos and Leonardo da Vincis, and trying to locate Julius Caesar’s burial place, we spent hours pounding the streets seeking AS Roma Stores.

There are about ten of them in the city, plus a few Nike stores – also official kit stockists – and we visited every one. Each time, we had to fight our way past hordes of fanatical football supporters queuing to buy semi-final ticket – queues only slightly shorter than those to get into St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City.

Then we had to jostle with those grabbing the home, away and Champions League-kit shirts, which we could only find in large and extra-large, since all the popular sizes had sold out. At one point, we whizzed past a shop selling gorgeous Italian leather handbags at a fraction of the price we’d pay at home. But there was no time to stop and do any shopping for ourselves.

“Do you think he might grow into this?” I said wearily at one point, holding up the last home-kit shirt in one official Roma shop, sized XXL.

By this stage, trips to the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel appeared almost incidental, in between tracking down every AC Roma store we could locate on Google Maps, for we knew the boys would be severely disappointed if we didn’t return with a shirt for each of them.

By the third day, my feet were covered in blisters and the charm of the cobbled streets had worn thin. But, eventually, we found two medium sized away-kit shirts in a store close to the Pantheon. We even managed to snap up the last two AF Roma keyrings.

Having got through two packs of blister plasters, I woke the next day with red and swollen elephantiasis-like feet. We had a few hours to fill before our taxi was due to take us to the airport, so decided to pay a last visit to one of our favourite cafes, across the road from our bed and breakfast.

I had two pairs of shoes, but couldn’t get my feet into either of them. Luckily, I had brought my bedroom slippers, which were the only things which fitted.

They did look rather odd with my summer dress and denim jacket: “Who’s going to care? We’ll never see these people again,” I said, as I hobbled along the street.

But as we got off the plane at Leeds Bradford Airport in heavy rain, several hours later, I must have looked distinctly odd. My husband was waiting to meet us at the airport. “What on earth are you wearing?” he grimaced as we walked towards the car.

When we arrived home, the 15-year-old, no doubt keen to see what I’d brought him back, greeted me at the door: “Why are you wearing bedroom slippers?” he laughed.

“Don’t you start,” I warned him.

WE stopped to ask directions from a woman who turned out to be from San Francisco and walked with us to the Vatican: “I’m here with a girlfriend,” she explained. “We’re travelling around Italy for a month.”

Their husbands were a bit shocked when they announced they were going to do it, she said: “But our children are all grown up now, and we’re celebrating 25 years of motherhood. We reckon we deserve it.”

Now, there’s an idea…