Smells like antiquity

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I've been here a week, so the first couple entries are written from the perspective of at least a couple days.

The three day trip from America finally having ended, Lucy and I decide to head out into the city after dinner. The area of Rome that we live in is pretty modern, so we have to walk a ways to get to the good ruined stuff. It's about a 30 minute trek down to the coliseum, an enormous multi-level stack of arches. I'd been warned that Rome is a bit dirty, and it is, although not any more than downtown San Francisco. The only real problem is the smell. Appia nuova, the main road, smells not so much of an open sewer as just farts. It's like there's a big fat person preceding us, emitting a constant stream of flatulence. Lucy has a cold and claims not to smell anything, but a couple thousand years of sewage appears to have seeped into and suffused every microscopic pore in all the masonry and mortar. And the whole damn place is brick. Oh, and the coliseum is cool.

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