A merrier day did never yet greet Rome

This post is about Monday, June 20th, which was my first day in Rome!  Major day in Rome.  We got a really late start that morning and didn't get to our first stop until around noon.  We took the metro in after a very interesting breakfast (I had nutella yogurt and this really delicious orange lemon carrot juice which sounds weird but is really good, and croissants which appear to be typical food for Rome) and hopped off at the Colosseum!  Really it was sort of akin to the moment when you walk out of the Westminster Tube stop and Big Ben is just stretching to the sky above you.  We got off the metro stop and there was the Colosseum just sitting there.  You know, famous Roman architecture across the street from the metro.

We managed to skip most of the line by going to the front and paying to go on a guided tour (you can do the same if you get an audio guide) which was very interesting.  It was really really hot though.  I'd forgotten what it was like to sweat all over your body.  Yeah I know, lovely.  But the Colosseum was really neat.

Me outside the Colosseum.

And David and I inside.  The Colosseum is a very photogenic piece of architecture.

Although did you know that when women went to the Colosseum they had to sit on wooden benches at the very top, while the men sat down below on marble benches.  Yeah.  You have to wonder if any of those "delicate" women ever really did faint from the sight of blood or whatever and fell or tumbled down because the stairs were pretty steep.  Another interesting thing that I learned is that the Colosseum was built in a lake's equivalent of a riverbed.  Nero made himself a lake for his enormous palace so that he could have mock sea battles on it.  Well, he was seventeen or eighteen.  I know several teenage boys who would totally do the same thing if they were suddenly emperor.  Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool to hear that the main reason the Colosseum was shaped the way it is was because it was built in a lake bottom.  

Alright, well we left the Colosseum and walked towards the Roman Forum.  We stopped for lunch along the way to get pasta (I got tortellini) and "italian bread" that was pretty good, and then we got the most delicious gelato of our whole Italian experience.  Quite honestly, this was almost comparable to the cookie cup explosion.  

SO delicious.

Well anyway, we wandered on over to the Roman forum.  My dad kept marveling (rightly so) over the way that there were just all these Roman ruins lying around.  No cataloging, only a simple bar keeping visitors from climbing all over them, knocked over pillars just lying in the dirt, etc.  We found this one section where they were doing excavation work, so we kind of wandered around it and went inside this brick building tucked behind the work.  It was full of all of these statues of Nero and stuff, so we're wandering around thinking about how great it is to be inside out of the hot sun and what a convenient building this is when my dad comes over from where he's listening to the audio guide and informs us that we're standing in the Roman Senate on a tile floor that's been there since the time of Julius Cesar.  The steps we walked up to get into the building are the steps where Romulus was killed.  It was pretty awesome.

We were caught unawares sitting on the floor where Roman senators debated whether or not to attack Carthage.

Yeah, so I totally wandered into the Roman Senate without a clue as to the fact that it was the Roman Senate.  It's still a totally sound and complete building.  (It was turned into a church for a while, so that explains the wholeness of the building).  We went and wandered some more.  Some other notable things we saw were the remains of Saturn's temple.

You can thank my brother for the excellence of the sun in this picture.

and the Vestia, where the Vestals lived.  The Vestals were priestesses of a sort I suppose, but their main job appears to have been to keep the fire of Vestia from going out (Vestia is the goddess of the hearth sort of) and to stay chaste.  Apparently Vestia really liked virgins.  Every year all of the women in Rome would come to Vestia's fire and take some of it home with them.  You know, light a branch and carry it back to their own hearth so that the goddess's protection could extend to their homes.

This is the central courtyard for the Vestals.  

We kept wandering through the Roman stuff after that, eventually going up to the top of the hill and looking at a few more really neat buildings and getting an awesome view of Rome and finding some nice orange trees before we needed to move on.  We got back on the metro and stopped off at this random little square that's a top sight in Rome I suppose.  It was sort of this big fancy hotel/mall with a really neat fountain in the middle.  There was this really old church there too.  I guess that this church used to be part of the largest baths in the Roman empire, although most of them are gone now, so that was kind of neat.

Next we stopped off at the Trevi fountain.  You walk down all of these tiny, twisted streets that are crowded with stalls and people and the occasional car in the areas that weren't pedestrian only and suddenly there's this enormous fountain absolutely swarmed with people.

Yeah, I was making faces.  

We tossed coins into the fountain (over our shoulders) because it's said that if you toss a coin in the Trevi fountain then you're ensured to return to Rome, which is something that I DEFINITELY want to do.

Yeah, so then we wandered over to the Spanish Stairs which didn't strike me as particularly Spanish, but they were pretty neat so we climbed up to the top and had this really cool view of the sun meeting the tops of the buildings around as it set.  There was this big obelisk up there too and the Medici home.  Yeah, they have one in Rome too I guess.

On the Spanish Steps!

Then we kept wandering down the road (all this stuff was in the same general area and NONE of it was convenient to the Metro) to Popolo Square.  We actually ended up above it first where there was this really gorgeous park, but we went down to it eventually.  This is home to the biggest obelisk that we'd seen so far and was the original northern entrance to Rome, which is really the one that counts I think.  Also apparently the sight of public executions for a long time.

The gate into Rome.

Alright, almost done I SWEAR.  We then walked out through the gates to the metro stop only to discover that the Metro closes at 9:00 every night while they're doing work on it.  Anyone want to guess what time it was when we made that discovery?  9:15.  Heck yes.  Luckily there was a bus stop near by, so we figured out the bus system (which is WAY easier than the London bus system just to let you all know) and hopped on the bus we needed.  There was this really really gorgeous Italian man on the bus which made for a nice ride.  He reassured my parents that they were on the right route by showing them where we were on the map when he got off.

Yeah, so we eventually got back to our hotel and sat out on our little balcony area (yeah it was like this private balcony, SO cool.) and ate rolls and apricots.  It was an absolutely beautiful day.  Long and lovely, even if I then had to go sit in the lobby for an hour or so to do my schoolwork.

Whew!  That's the end of a horrendously long post.  I promise that's the longest post I'll ever write.  Luckily most of the benefit is just for me.