Our first major stop was the Colosseum. We saw a bunch of random neat stuff on the way, but if I try to describe every single neat thing we spotted, we’ll be here all week. Anyway, the Colosseum was really impressive. I liked wandering out into the center and imagining a roar of the crowd as I appeared. It must have been quite a sight. They had some displays around the outside with historical notes and archeological findings. My favorite was the descriptions of the games the crowd would play during and between fights. Rolling the bones, and such. Jess wanted, of course, to go explore the area down beneath the floor where the stages and lifting cages would be. It wasn’t open, though. We did wander all around to get a sense of the size of the place, though. Truly an engineering marvel.
Gladiator muscles! Arrrrr.
We got some underwhelming but nourishing street food from a vendor after that and then wandered to The Palantine Hill, a large, sprawling area with a boatload of ruins of an old castle. We poked our heads in all sorts of corners, we especially liked the bathhouse area because we walked up on the third floor. That area must have been gigantic. We also saw the very famous, very old Circus Maximus which wins the award for most underwhelming ruin in all of Europe. It just looks like a big field with a dirt ring worn in it. I could imagine high schoolers playing flag football there on the weekends, but nope. Big famous ruin. Ben Hur and all that.
A statue pose on Palantine hill. Not bad, if I do say so myself.
After quite a long time checking out the Palantine Hill ruins (mostly brick) and then wandered to an overlook of the old Roman forum (mostly marble). Very little of it remains intact, but there are a few really impressive buildings all within a block of each other. A couple of historic arches, the location of several important temples and even a few columns that have stood, despite the attempts by guys trying to get some cheap marble, for thousands of years. I also liked how there was so much ancient roman marble that they just left it lying around in piles. You could sit on it, sketch it, whatever. Just ancient stuff. We have it all over Rome.
So after the ‘really old rocks’ tour, we found ourselves outside the ‘monument to victory’ building, which, I’m told, is also famous. Then we wandered around the Parthenon again. I considered getting a Church chalice as my ‘container souvenir’ for europe, after all, we did spend an enormous amount of time in churches of one form or another, but the cool looking ones were all way too expensive, and the cheaper ones weren’t preposterously elaborate enough. They had a whole bunch of church gear around the Parthenon, though. Kind of like outlet shopping for catholic churches, I should think. Kind of like going to Belgum to get your chocolate or Germany to get your beer. You want the real crazy chalices, you go to Rome.
After some more wandering, we went ‘square hunting’. Lots of historic squares to see in rome. We settled in Piazza Navone and had some pizza outside and stared at people and fountains to recharge the ol’ batteries. Then we went south to Campo Di Fiori, another famous square, but the market there was just wrapping up and it was just all full of half deconstructed market booths and old vegetable matter. It didn’t look particularly famous, but what do I know? We got some more gelato there. Yum.
Yum. Yum yum yum. Yum. Good way to fuel up for all the walking, too.
We made another random stop when we walked by a museum that said it had a bunch of DaVinci stuff. Being good engineers, we felt like checking it out. It was pretty great, they had a bunch of his old sketches and had actually recreated a lot of the things he had sketched and designed, including crazy things like a tank with 16 cannons around the outside and really fundamental things like *ball bearings*. Pretty neat little distraction.
Ball bearings, for crying out loud! What a role model for aspiring engineers.
We wandered through some random back alleys (always a fun pastime in Rome) and found ourselves at the Trevere River. We sat and watched it flow for a while, and then wandered back north to the main area of rome through an alley covered with graffiti and still full of tourists. Neat highlight. Our plan, after that, was to walk along Via Del Corso, but we decided instead to be tired. We still had to walk all they way back to the hotel, though, and we saw the four fountains of San Carlo. If Rome has a checklist, we must have ticked a lot of boxes.
Back at the hostel, we checked out the alleyway behind a window in the stairway and the cat brothers came over to see what was going on. Turns out their are four of them, and they get all excited and big-eyed whenever we came to the window, but the never came close to let us pet them. Then a bunch of writing and dinner at a restaurant near the hostel that was well reviewed in the guidebook. It wasn’t bad, but we had good food all over, really. Then resting and writing. Trust me, we took a lot of notes, it took quite a while each day to write it all down.
-N
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