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Published: September 18th 2014
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We began the morning with our first tour of the trip. We met our tour guide at 8:30 am this morning at entrance of the Colosseum. Our tour guide Francesca gave us a wonderful and informative tour of the Colosseum. The Colosseum took 10 years to build and had events twice a week. It held 60,000 people and even had a cotton dome top (sort like the old Metrodome), except they had slaves to pulley it each time they needed it to keep the sun from bearing down on the crowd. The floor of the Colosseum housed different scenery, animals and also the famous gladiators. Quite an engineering foot!
We left the Colosseum and toured the Roman Forum, Palatine Hill and all of its ancient ruins and arches. So much history to see, and to see all of in the heart of Rome. We did a lot of walking and saw a lot of old structures, many of them built shortly after the death of Jesus Christ. We finished our tour around noon and got caught in short rainstorm, Dan did a great job of reading an old wet map and locating our lunch restaurant. Pasta and salad and then
off to cross the Tiber River and head to the Trastevere area of Rome.
The Trastevere has the old colorful Rome with wonderful side streets, old beautiful churches and of course the gelato stands. We found the gelato stand our guide suggested and it was truly delicious.
Rome has a lot fast drivers in little cars (See the attached picture of the parking job) and hundreds of scooters. They are driving together on multi-lane roads and very few stop light cross walks. You just start walking out and hope they will stop. Dan got us back across the Tiber and our way to the Pantheon neighborhood. We discovered a number of beautiful piazza’s (large open squares with many people, restaurants, and fountains). Many of our pictures are of the Campo de Flori and Navona piazza. The Navona piazza had a very large fountain called The Four Rivers Fountain. We then made our way to the Pantheon and finally ending up at the Victor Emmanuel Monument. They call it the “Wedding Cake” because of the whiteness and the large horses and riders on the top. We climbed the stairs and headed to the back and there is a beautiful
bar that overlooks the ruins and the Colosseum.
We headed back to our hotel and then got ready supper. We headed about three blocks north of our hotel and found a small cozy restaurant, call Clementini. We enjoyed raviolis and home mad spaghetti with long noodles and eggplant. Wonderful meal and Dan, Jane and Sherry had a wonderful bottle of red wine and the experience was truly what you would expect in Rome.
We completed our day at our hotel‘s roof top restaurant and lounge with dessert and several games of 500! Jane and Sherry beat our butts!
Wonderful day and Friday we head to the Vatican!
Doug & Sherry and Dan & Jane
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