4-12-09 Rome Day 1

Today we took a short train ride to Rome (about 2 hours). From the train station we went straight to the subway and took that to the Colosseum stop. As you come up the stairs from this stop the Colosseum itself greets you in all of its magnificence. We took a quick look at the outside, and then walked to our hotel nearby.

When we got there, we found that it was similar to our hotel in Florence, except that this one included breakfast. The lady who met us spoke almost no English, so it was tough going, but eventually we found out that the room wasn’t ready yet but would be in about 30 minutes. We decided to leave our backpacks there and hit the Colosseum, Forum, and Palatine Hill right away.

We went through each of these sites. Outside the Colosseum a few locals are always dressed in Legionnaire outfits, charging a fee to have a picture taken with them. We saw the Colosseum itself, which was impressive, and we saw some of the animal bones excavated from the floor, and the remnants of the complicated elevator system in the floor.

The Palatine and the Forum were less enjoyable to me because of the racket museums have going these days. Even though you’ve paid for your ticket, museums have removed all of the information from their exhibits, which forces you to spend an extra 10€ on a guidebook or a tour guide in order to know what you’re looking at. We’ve gotten by just fine up to this point with the materials and research we had done beforehand, but the Forum and the hill were more or less mysterious. The sights there were still awesome, but at times they were just piles of really old bricks.

One thing we were able to discover is that most of the ruins we were looking at were from the later stages of the Roman Empire, somewhere between 300 and 800 A.D. Most of my knowledge of Roman history covers earlier periods, especially the Civil War period around 50 B.C. or so. For example, we found the building where the Roman Senate met, but this wasn’t the same building in which Caesar was murdered, because at that time the Senate was meeting across town.

Most of the time, restaurants near tourist sites are ridiculously expensive, but for the Colosseum this isn’t always the case. We found a row of restaurants near the Colosseum that were all reasonably priced, and we had a nice lunch with the Colosseum in view.

We finally got into our hotel room. One thing I’m starting to notice about Europe is that many, many places haven’t changed their locks in decades – most of them barely work. In our hotel room, the door wouldn’t stay shut unless it was locked, so we had to lock ourselves in our room whenever we were there. The elevator in this building is the old style with an outer and inner door, and the outer door on the first floor is broken shut, so you have to walk up a flight of stairs to get on the elevator up to your floor. It took us a few tries to figure out that the ‘3’ button in the elevator would take us to the 5^th floor where our room was.

We were exhausted as usual (having walked probably 5 miles that day), so we decided if we went to bed early we could skip dinner and save some precious cash.