Overnight, it began raining quite heavily, and I could hear it outside, so I wasn't particularly in a rush to get up the next morning. (We later found out that it had rained 3 inches in 8 hours overnight, which is a lot.) Then in the morning Nick got to open a birthday present from me -- "skewers" for his bike (something he had been wanting). Then Nick went to the store to get breakfast to eat in the room before we headed out for the day to prevent any strops like the one the day before. Then we actually ate breakfast in the room. So it was about 10:30 or 11 before we were finally out the door.
At this point, it wasn't raining, although it was still overcast. We headed to the metro, and changed correctly for the B line this time. Then we were at the Colosseum, which Nick was excited to see on his birthday. The bad weather combined with the fact that it was a weekday meant that it was very un-crowded, and we were able to buy tickets and enter right away.
Once inside, we started on the ground level, from which we could see down into the complicated below-ground-level structures. These were a series of smallish rooms that were used in ancient Rome to house whatever was going to be coming up into the floor of the arena: gladiators, exotic animals, etc. Apparently they even had a system of elevators they could use that went up through the floors so that the objects of interest could make suitably dramatic entrances. When we were looking in at the whole system, it seemed very swampy (I was getting attacked by mosquitos), but it's unclear whether it has always been naturally swampy or whether that was a function of the heavy rain the night before.
We additionally figured out where the seats for the emperor and the Vestal Virgins would have been -- at the north and south points of the short axis. From there, we headed up to the "first" level (as distinguished from ground level).
One interesting feat of engineering that was part of the Colosseum was the fact that it could be filled and emptied extremely quickly because of the use of "vomitoriums" (vomitoria?) -- stairways that went up through the stands backwards, kind of. You still see them in some modern arenas. You don't throw up in the vomitoriums (usually). Instead, they get their name because the arena is puking out people quickly through them.
So we went up a vomitorium. It's unclear to me whether this was just a repaired and renovated ancient vomitorium or whether it was constructed much later; so much of the Colosseum is in such ruins that it's hard to picture exactly what's what. I guess I need to watch Gladiator.
So on the "first" floor, we could get a good view of the Palatine, one of the ancient hills of Rome where early governments sat. We could also see the nearby Arch of Constantine from above.
From there, we moved onto the art exhibit housed in a small gallery on part of this level. Having an exhibit there isn't strange; the Colosseum has had a lot of interesting uses throughout the millennia since falling into disuse in the sixth century: It was used as a fortified castle in the middle ages, but also has held churches, cemetaries, shops, and homes. Additionally, a lot of the stone, marble, and bronze comprising it was quarried for other uses over the years.
The exhibit was about returning ancient pieces of art to their original homes (although it took us a little while to figure this out because, because the gallery is totally open, we entered the exhibit at the end and worked towards the beginning, so it didn't entirely become clear to us at once). So the exhibit was essentially ancient sculptures that Italy had regained. The captions on a lot of the works were in both English and Italian, and described where the artwork had been, and how Italy got it back. However, a lot of the captions were a little, err, one-sided. Italy was always fighting tooth-and-nail to get its art back, but the exhibit had a few replicas of pieces from Greece and northern Africa that, "in the spirit of international cooperation," Italy had very generously returned the originals of on its own accord. Additionally, there were a few references to art destroyed by those bad, bad Germans during World War II, conveniently failing to mention that Italy allied itself with Germany. But the art exhibit was still very interesting.
Then we took a look at the interior of the Colosseum from this upper level. You can see that there is a platform built partway across at ground level that gives a bit sense of what the stadium actually looked like when in use. One interesting thing that we found out was that arena is the latin word for "sand," which is what initially covered the floor of the Colosseum (mostly because it was particularly good at soaking up blood).
At this point, it started to rain again, so I lugged my umbrella out of Nick's pack. It was covered in choclate chip cookie crumbs from the cookies that Nick is absolutely addicted to. I was not thrilled. He even managed to get some on the inside of the umbrella, so they weren't even washed off by the rain. Adding to my problems was the fact that I broke the umbrella soon after I got it, so now (a) the stem doesn't extend all the way and (b) if it's windy and you're not careful, the whole mushroom top of the umbrella blows off the stem. So at that point I was trying to use both hands (which were getting wet in the freezing rain) to control the umbrella and keep the top of it from flying away and down two stories into the lion's den, which would probably result in me being thrown out of Italy for destroying the Colosseum. But I tried to keep my fussing to a minimum because it was Nick's birthday.
Meanwhile, Nick was a bit stroppy that the upper, only partially remaining levels were not accessible to the public. He likes going up things. So at that point, our self-tour of the Colosseum was pretty much over. We headed outside.
At that point, Nick and I debated what to do, since our tickets to the Colosseum also gave us free access to the Palatine as well as the Forum, but if I had to look around both that day in the rain I would freeze to death. So, instead, we decided that we would go to the Palatine today, and return to the Forum on Friday, since our tickets were good for two days (as you'll see, this didn't work out as planned, but you'll have to wait for that).
So Nick and I trudged across the street and up the hill to the Palatine, which turned out to be surprisingly cool. The ancient Roman emperors both lived and ruled from buildings on this hill, which has the Colosseum on one side, the Circus Maximus on another, and the Forum on a third. It sounds as if it must have been really beautiful, because apparently when the buildings were in use, they were covered in colored marble and there were reflecting pools all over the place. I would have liked it.
The "huts of Romulus and Remus" were the next things we found on the Palatine. They're excavations of truly ancient buildings that date back to the time of Rome's founding.
From there, we passed what appeared to be the excavated House of Augustus and House of Livia, although it was hard figuring out exactly what was what because some of the signage didn't seem to line up. Plus we were too cold to investigate that aggressively.
Then we headed over to the Farnese Gardens, which are on the part of the hill that overlooks the Forum. They were built in the mid-16th century as one of the world's first botanical gardens on top of some other ruins (a lot of Rome feels truly three-dimensional because it just seems like whenever anyone wanted anything new in Rome, they just plopped it down on top of whatever was there before).
By now, Nick and I had gotten quite hungry, but it was still raining so we decided that we would just head back to our room to eat our sandwich lunches, since it wasn't all that far away by metro and would probably be a better bet than any of our other options (like taking the metro to the Termini and finding random benches to eat on; an idea I shot down quickly -- I wanted to warm up). So we headed back to the room and ate a slow lunch while I looked up some of the stuff we had seen that morning and early afternoon on the internet to learn more about it. I also confirmed that the hot water was back; apparently it had been briefly out in the morning because somehow the rain from the night before had knocked it out (Italy does not seem to cope well with rain). But it was back; yay!
We spent an hour or two relaxing in the room before I was warmed up enough to head out, so by the time we left again it was getting near dusk (Rome is at about the same latitude as Boston, and it was almost winter solstice). We decided we would do a walking tour suggested by our guidebook that started near the Vittorio Emanuele Monument that we had seen the night before. So we took the metro and a quick ride on the tiny electric bus to get back to the Monument. At the square (the Piazza del Popolo) between the metro stop and the bus stop, we took a few pictures.
After the bus ride, we got to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument and the crazy traffic square/roundabout near it, and started the guidebook's tour. The tour was of Capitoline Hill, another of Rome's seven hills.
One of the first things we saw on the tour was excavated apartments from ancient Roman times, which again illustrated how deep all the old ruins go. These excavated apartments went up to current street level -- but that was their sixth floor. You could look down to see how far they went. It seems like all of Rome just was constantly plonked down on top of older stuff. In fact, part of the remains were once used as part of a church in the Middle Ages.
From there, we headed up the hill to a point where we could get good views and Nick was able to enjoy playing with his camera settings.
From there, we looked around for the Tarpeian Rock that they used to throw people off of (mostly traitors), but we're not sure whether we saw it or not. Then, we headed over to the Piazza del Campidoglio, the central Piazza on top of the hill, by walking through an entry way in the Palazzo Nuovo, one of the Capitoline Museums (we didn't actually go into them, though).
We got some good views of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (one of the Capitoline Museums that had its current design created by Michelangelo), the Palazzo Senatorio (another Capitoline Museum with stairs by Michelangelo that now has Rome's City Hall), and the Marcus Aurelius statue in the middle of the square (that Michelangelo was apparently not a big fan of).
From there, we headed back down to the street, and then up to the Santa Maria in Aracoeli church. From the top of the staircase outside the church, we were able to get a few more good views of the Piazza del Campidoglio.
After that, the Capitoline Hill tour was done, but we decided to head over to the Piazza Navona on our way to dinner, where we saw the famous Fountain of the Four Rivers, as well as some smaller auxiliary fountains. The Piazza also had a lot of stalls that had everything from carnival games to candy (which intrigued me).
After that, we headed to dinner. We were going to go to another restaurant recommended by Gianpaolo's friend, but we weren't sure whether it was open. Adding to the confusion was that it had outdoor seating that was surrounded by a transparent temporary plastic thing to keep it warm (a lot of restaurants had them), but Nick and I didn't see an obvious door in the plastic thing to get us into the restaurant...so we looked at the restaurant next door, which also looked quite good and had an obvious door. So we went to that one instead. It was good pizza. Additionally, the waitress asked whether we wanted water, which threw me for a loop because I knew most restaurants don't like to give out tap water. But I was wondering whether the waitress was asking because she knew we were Anglo/American, so I tried to communicate that, sure, I wanted tap water, but not bottled water. I had even looked up how to say this once, but even the internet didn't give me that straightforward an answer. But because I have the tendency to keep talking and talking if people don't understand me at first, the waitress brought over another guy to try to translate (even though it wasn't that big a deal), and he eventually figured it out -- "Aqua del Roma!" So we got a nice big jug of tap water.
On the way out, we passed the next door restaurant again, which we now saw had a door through the plastic. Just FYI.
After dinner we headed generally back to our room, but on the way stopped off at the Colosseum to get some good nighttime pictures of it.
Nick also got a few pictures of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, and I also got bored.
At that point, it had started to rain a little again, so we headed back to our room for good. On the way, we had to take a bus to the Termini station, and got the 64. Nick reminded me that it was the pickpocket bus (it runs between the Termini and the Vatican and gets a lot of tourists), but it wasn't particularly crowded when we were on it. Boring!
It was a good day, though. Here's a map of some of the places we visited:
View Larger Map
Only a day and a half more to document!
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