It's an experience I recommend at least once in your life.
After an exciting trip from Florence to Rome, we got off the train a little hungry and quite ready to have our packs off our backs. I began to look around for the McDonald's, because Sarai said that she would meet us there if she wasn't at our terminal by 2:45 for some reason. I headed off in the direction of the Golden Arches when Christine said, "There she is!" And so it came to be that I was tackled by my friend that had spent entirely too many days around people she had just met. It was quite a wonderful beginning to a week's worth of adventure.
Sarai has been travelling by herself down from Reykejavic through Sweden, France, Spain and who knows where else and had already been in Rome a few days. With the help of Rick Steves, she had our next few days planned out for us. "I've been waiting until you guys got here to do all the touristy stuff," she said. "It's miserable to do it without friends." We were slated to tour the ruins of ancient Rome the next day and the Vatican the next. Having a rather easy-going nature (especially when someone else offers to navigate), Christine and I agreed to the plan.
Rome is a walkable city. The hostel we were staying at was in a quiet, nice neighborhood with a laundromat and a supermarket ("It's like home, you guys! You can find all this at home!") and it was wonderful to spend an evening relaxing in that atmosphere. What was not as wonderful was the walk to the ruins in Rome the next morning. Well, afternoon. You can't expect us to be up that early. We trudged through neighborhoods and under ancient arches, past churches and obelisks and something along the lines of fifty gelatto shops.
Then, never failing in her eloquence, Sarai said, "Guys? That's the Colosseum." The first of many times.
The Colosseum is huge and impressive in real life. I mean, it's cool in pictures, but we've seen so many pictures that you can't be amazed by another one. But you can be amazed by the real thing. It's flooded with tourists and fake gladiators (the thought of which led us to several cries of "Rory!" with no regard to the difference between a centurion and a fake gladiator) and pockmarked with the abuse of several centuries of scavenging, but it's still a sight to see. We started out with the forum, though, because if you buy the ticket in the shorter line there, you get to pass the insanity-inducing ticket line at the Colosseum.
The Roman Forum is impressive to me mostly because I took a History of Rome class, where my professor had a British accent and a thousand stories about the Romans. I heard about the rise of the plebians and learned when to cite Scipio or Pompey as a leader or instigator in this or that war and fumbled through the line of emperors after Julius Caesar tossed off consulship for dictatorship. Most of the Rick Steve's tour was something half remembered for me, though it helped to have someone tell you the difference between these three collumns
and these two collumns
Or this arch
and this arch.
The Forum is a maze of leftover stones and temples, like the Temple of Saturn
or the house of the Vestial Virigins
or the place where they burned Julius Caesar's body, left as a temple to the deified Caesar by his heir, Augustus.
Seeking momentary shade from the afternoon sun, we climbed stairs that we hoped would lead us to Palatine Hill, the location of the palaces of the emperors, but instead we found a dark room with a fountain and a creepy, unmarked passageway that lead down a decaying flight of stairs to a corridor of unknown destination. Of course I went down it. Who isn't emboldened by an afternoon's history lesson about the workings of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire?
There isn't an epic end to this story, though. The hall turned into a dead end with a well and absolutely no zombies, werewolves, vampires, witches or wizards. Not even a skull for good measure. If I were going to tell this story in real life, I would say that I went down this creepy cave stairway...
and then I found five Euro. Gotta make it interesting somehow.
Palatine Hill afforded a lovely view of Rome and a great many more ruins, but the trip over to the Colosseum was infinitely more interesting. First off, the stairways and paths out of the Colosseum were called the vomitorium because the Colosseum could spew people like a frat boy spews PJ, getting rid of its entire 50,000 spectator population in an esitmated 15 minutes. If you need anything more interesting than that, you can see the outlay of the backstage part of the Colosseum where they kept the various animals and people that the gladiators would fight. The museum part wasn't particularly exciting. You have to take a step back and realize that when you're looking at these shards of pottery and bits of animal bones, you're looking at someone's trash. I'm glad all of our stuff is paper and will therefore not withstand the test of time. Otherwise, people are going to think we exchanged precious money to worship the cult of the Golden Arches and philosophers will spend centuries pondering the significance of the Golden Arches' association with a clown.
Be distracted from my cynicism with a cross!
It was put there in memoriam of the Christians who may have been killed in the Colosseum. I mean, it's known, or at least reported, the Nero launched a massive persecution of Christians after the great fire in 64, even using them as torches to light his garden at night, but they probably weren't killed in the Colosseum. Still, it's a nice thought. The cross, not the burnings.
The Forum, Palatine Hill and the Colosseum are, in fact, not close to the Pantheon, which is different from the Parthenon, which is in Athens. We walked over to the Pantheon and took many wonderful pictures, but since it's now a church (who knew?), it'll get a post to itself.
And that's how I got massively sunburn walking around Rome.
The end!
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