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Rome

The eternal city - a lifetime is not enough

Day One

After the early morning flight into the city, we trekked across town to find our accommodation at the Camping Village Roma, the campsite/mobile home/mini village where we settled into a small mobile home type box in a surreal type micro neighbourhood. After a brief nap to recover from the heat, we headed out to the colosseum, where we made a good investment to jump the queue and join an English speaking tour of the remains. We were quite lucky to have a very enthusiastic woman who really seemed to know her stuff and made our experience of the 1800 year old stadium worth our while. She told us interesting things, like the fact that entrance to the games was free and they gave away food and water and clothes to the spectators, and that the popes pillaged all marble from the interior of the stadium for St. Peters. Apparently the emperors curried favour with the citizens, or at least distracted them from the realities of the day by having animal and gladiator fights at a huge scale in the Colosseum. Now we just have movies like Pearl Harbour and Saving Private Ryan.
Despite what you may have seen in the film Gladiator, about 80%!o(MISSING)f the fighters who ended up at the colosseum in Rome, actually gained their freedom, not death as fights were typically stopped before things got too out of hand. Our tour guide seemed to give the impression that it was the massive animal brawls that were held before the gladiator fights that were the main attraction, not the gladiators themselves.

After the Colesseum, we walked through the Palatino, the hill upon which the emperors built their homes. Its now a series of ruins that leads down to the Forum which is the center of ancient Rome and where Romulus and Remus were said to have established the town in the first place. By the time we were walking through these truly ancient relics, we were very tired and grumpy so did not appreciate them as much as we probably should have, but it was still a magnificent spectacle and one can’t help but marvel at the huge structures that were built with what must have been extremely limited technology. One wonders where we would be today if it wasn’t for the dark ages.
Emerging from the forum, we dragged ourselves to Capitol hill (or rather some were doing the dragging, and some were doing the sulking over their very tiresome toetsies.) We eventually found ourselves at the fontana di trevi, despite it being very very far from the closest metro station and we summoned enough composure to toss a coin in to ensure our return.
The next day we got to experience what we found to be the best part of Rome,; just wandering about enjoying the streets filled with fashionable shops and little gelatos (ice-cream palours) or simply having Café Lattes (or Capachino Freddos) on the banks of the Tiber with some very sincere elderly shop owners who come running after you when you leave your sunglasses behind. We also got to check out the Campo di Fiore, a fresh food market, where we bought Chef Murray (though he doesn’t know it yet) some special Pasta spices (which is now contaminating all of Tina’s clothes with a herby smell, much to her chagrin). From the market we hit the Pantheon, the best preserved Roman building/monument where Raphael is entombed. It’s a massive building, or temple (in fact, its currently a church) with an awesome dome that boggles the imagination. It has a hole the top that lets the light of heaven (or the light of whatever Roman god it was at the time) in to illuminate the brilliant sculptures and the (sweaty) tourists that fill the interior. It’s another one of these structures where you struggle to comprehend how they could have possibly built it when they did without computer modeling and complicated static mathematic analysis. What leaves you even more thunderstruck, gobsmacked and bamboozled is that it still standing after almost 2000 years.

The Vatican

Our Roman adventure climaxed with a day in the Vatican City. We started out in the early morning at St. Peter's basilica where we were ushered straight up to the cupola as we’d timed our arrival with early morning mass so they’d closed entry to the main part of the cathedral. We thought we were being lazy by taking the elevator (for an extra 2 euros), but we still found ourselves struggling up the additional 551 steps after the elevator to the top of the cupola where we were met with unparalleled views of Rome in the morning. We stopped on the way down for refreshments and to send some postcards with real Vatican stamps, partially satiating our homesickness, hopefully they’ll arrive quite soon.

We descended to the ground floor and rushed to La Pieta to try and take some pictures especially for Chrisdad. Its one of those sculptures that never fails to take your breath away no matter how long you stand in front it filled with a sense of awe. (Michaelangelo was only 23 when he sculpted it!). The rest of the Vatican is so grand and magnificent with such incredibly high ceiling, that one cannot help but being filled with a sense of the divine even if nothing else stands out in particular.

Once we had our fill of the St Peter’s Basillica we headed towards the Vatican Museums where we had booked a reservation online so we didn’t have to stand in the long queues that we’ve been told about. What a waste of money - total Scam!!! Because we had gotten there quite early, there wasn’t much of a queue, so we actually ended up paying for a “guided” tour that was just a racket to get you in the door with no actual guiding!! What grates is the fact that we’ve made reservation with the same company for two places in Florence. But what’s Rome without being scammed in some way?
From one room to another, each filled with magnificent artwork, we eventually arrived at the Sistine Chapel. Though to be honest, we both felt that Raphael’s rooms were just as good as the famous chapel and we’re not sure why they don’t get as much glory as the chapel. It was not pleasant to be ushered along hundreds of other hot and very sweaty galleries, continually expecting to arrive at the Sistine Chapel but instead being met with some other grand room. Its quite silly, but in the midst of all this magnificence, one is reduced to thinking that the other galleries, like the Egyptian exhibition and the animal room for example, are quite mundane when I’m sure if they were standalone museums, they’d warrant dedicated blogs on their own, so regard everything we say about them as terrific understatements. Umm, so we saw the Egyptian exhibit, and it was quite cool. The room with all the ancient roman statues was quite good too.
As the anti-climax… we’ve seen some truly magnificent ancient artwork, but to seal the deal, we ended up doing some fantastically mind blowing Italian shoe shopping, that ended up in zero shoes bought! True art does not need to owned apparently.
So tomorrow we head off to the origin of the Renaissance, the birth place of Michaelangelo. Lets hope we can get tickets.

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