Gladiatorial Rome

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Another 6 hour bus trip from Venice and we arrived at our next destination - Rome. The bus dropped at at the mighty Collosseum. Great place to start. The ancient stadium had a great audio guide and is incredibly impressive structure, not unlike modern stadiums of today.

From there, we walked past all the major attaractions - the Trevi Fountain where we trhough coins over our right shoulders for luck, the Spanish Steps where all the beautiful people sit and linger and the Pantheon. In just a couple of hours, it is easy to walk around so many historical monuments that it is completely mind-blowing. We finished in the Piazza Navona, a beautiful square and with so many great places to eat around it.

The next day we had a guided tour of the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel by a local guide. The amount of people making the pilgrimage to the Vatican was amazing (it was the lead up to Easter which made it worse). After arrive at 8:15am, we still have to queue for an hour to get in! The tour contained many amazing pieces of art and sculpture and culminated in the amazing Sistine Chapel - Michaelangelo's creation which is incomprehensable when you see the intricate details on the ceiling. Craning the neck for half an hour was enough to admire the Sistine Chapel.

St Peters Basilica was also visited before we left the Vatican City - no sign of the Pope though. We wandered through the streets of central Rome and found somewhere to have some great pasta - not hard to find really. We then went to the Roman Forum, a huge area of ancient ruins that were massive. It is really amazing the size and scale of Rome back in the Roman Empire days. We then went to the monks church where there were some very creepy catacombs. It was a great sunny day and we had some more gelati as we were looking at the sights of Rome. 2 days was really not enough to spend in Rome, it is such a bustling metropolis that to see it all would take much longer than we had.

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