Annette and Rick's European Adventure 2011: "All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome"

Sunday was the day for us to flock to Rome via Eurostar Italia. We went for one last stroll in Florence along the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where vintage cars were driving around and suddenly a platoon of soldiers carrying brass insruments and with ostrich feathers in their hats started marching down the street we were walking on towards the one of the bigger Piazzi. They marched double-time after an ear-splitting brass flourish, stopped at the next Piazza and played marching band music at allegretto tempi and even sang a song.
After checking out of our charming but slightly shabby Florentine hotel we waited an hour at the chaotic Firenze station before travelling first-class on the high speed train to Rome. The scenery on the way was magical!
We walked to our Roman hotel with the and found it to be quite nice, more like Opera Cadet in Paris than anything else but with no bath and no extra bed.
After a quick freshen-up we walked to a nearby restaurant and Net had a good steak and I had a good pizza - finally some nice tasting food after the blandness of Florence!
Then we went on our customary stroll through a new city, though we'd never been in as ancient a city as Rome and ended up at the Trevi fountain which was as crazy as the Mona Lisa, crammed tight with camera-snapping tourists.

After breakfast the next day we decided to have a look at the Colosseum and thought it would be a good idea to take the Metro there as there’s a station called Colosseo right at the huge edifice’s doorstep. Rome’s Metro is nowhere near as extensive as Paris’s or London’s - there are two lines, Line A and Line B and our hotel has a Line B station nearby and it’s Line B that goes to the Colosseo and well as Circo Massimo, though we thought we’d leave looking at the Circus Maximus for another day. We walked to Roma Termini (Rome Terminus) rather than catching the Metro from “our station”, Castro Pretorio, because we had to confirm our St Peters and Sistine Chapel tour and the tour place was right near the big Rome intercity train station. It took us ages to find where the Metro actually was amidst all the Italian intercity and inter-country lines; when we found it we couldn’t work out where to buy a ticket and after more going round in circles we realised that the Metro was closed anyway because of a strike!
So we decided to walk, which is what we usually end up doing anyway - walking all day more often than not.

We stopped at a restaurant as we approached the Colosseum for a bit of a caffeine boost - Net was craving a real coffee after the slop she got at breakfast at the hotel and I thought I needed a Red Bull to last the whole day. We chatted to the waiter and thought we’d finally found a friendly Italian but he turned out to be Romanian. He’d studied to be an Orthodox priest in his home country but decided to emigrate to Italy with his wife for more opportunity. As he said, “Romania's government is like the mafia”. I asked him what it was like under Ceausescu, even though he would have only been a bambino then. He said that, though Ceausescu was bad, things were worse now.

We walked on and turned the corner and there it was - what a sight! The Colosseum has been standing there for one thousand nine hundred and thirty one years. We stood in front of this entertainment centre and did our usual-for-this-trip ritual of gasping and exclaiming to each other “I can’t believe we’re actually here!”, as we’ve done about a hundred times in the last month or so. But the Flavian Ampitheatre is the oldest building we’ve seen so far so it was special. And it’s terrible to think of all the ghastly things that went on in there as “entertainment” for hundreds of years. Gladiators were still killing and being killed in the arena until at least the middle of the 400s, long after the Roman empire became Christian, and there were animal hunts until the mid 500s.

Vespasian was the emperor that started off the building and it was opened during the reign of his son, Titus. It held 50,000 people and the arena was smaller than a modern footy ground: 85 metres by 48 metres. The arena comprised a wooden floor covered by sand to soak up all the blood. In fact, the word arena means sand in Latin. When you go inside you feel even more that sense of what a terrible place it was, the weight of all that history and all the death rituals that were carried out there for so long presses down on you, especially as you climb the incredibly steep stairs - how did the short Romans manage! The plebes had to go right up the top of course.

Centurions stopping for a fag

We’d marvelled at the exterior but before we actually went inside we explored the Palatine Hill and some of the Forum. People were queuing up for miles to get inside the Colosseum but we found a ticket office leading into the Palatine and the price included entrance to everything: the Colosseum, the Palatine and the Forum! Because I hadn’t done my research, I didn’t realise that the Forum is even more gob-smackingly amazing than the Palatine so we spent ages in the former and were too stuffed by the time we got to the Forum side as we wanted to keep some of our energy for the inside of the Colosseum. The intense heat here makes sight-seeing difficult. You get drenched in sweat and the sunshine is very intense so you need to be well sunblocked or covered up. We couldn’t imagine how hot it musty have been in summer!

The complex that the ticket price of 20 Euro gets you into is a huge open-air museum. There is so much to see, it’s absolutely staggering! There’s the house of Livia, Augustus’s wife, the Temple of Cybele, the House of Tiberius, the second emperor; the Flavian Palace - the Flavian emperors were Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, the Hippodrome of Domitian; it just goes on and on and it’s an essential part of the Roman sightseeing itinerary. And then there’s the Forum which is mind-blowing but, as I said, we didn’t give ourselves enough time; I ducked down for a relatively quick look while Net stayed in the shade of the Arch of Titus.

The Hippodrome of Domitian

Roman statue in a museum on the Palatine Hill

By the time we’d finished at the Colosseum we were completely stuffed! The Metro strike finished at 5pm and it was 5.30 now but there was only one ticket machine working and the queue for that was way too long so we ended up walking all the way across Rome to our hotel. Another full day of walking in the heat!