Roman Forum

From walking on the same stone streets as gladiators to seeing the very location of Julius Caesar's funeral pyre to exploring the remains of pagan temples and government buildings, visiting the Roman Forum was like living history. Unfortunately, good pictures from the experience seem to be few. But rest assured, you need to go. Now.


This is the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, dedicated to the deified emperor Pius Antoninus and his wife, Faustina the Elder.


Here I am in front of the Temple of Vesta, named for the goddess of the hearth, Vesta. Wikipedia says it was used as a storage location for Senate documents.

Water Fountains

We've been all over Europe and have seen that the probability of finding a public drinking fountain is similar to that of winning the lottery or encountering alien life. (Drinking water in that way would be so uncivilized, after all.)

Well, Rome is an exception. In Rome, they don't just have public drinking fountains, they have public drinking fountains - the kind where the water is spouted from a childen's mouth, or a stone jug, or a Greek goddess, or some such thing. I guess we can thank the original Romans for that.

It was, as they say, refreshing.

The Roman Coliseum

Enormous and imposing on the outside, but just intimate enough for blood sport on the inside, the Roman Coliseum was as awesome as we had hoped. We spent one of our mornings in Rome exploring its innards and imagining the many gladiatorial contests that took place there.


The Coliseum was constructed starting in the 1st century AD and has stood through the ravages of fires, earthquakes, and pillagers. The south side nose bleed seats, for instance, fell to an earthquake in 1349. However, Bill Bryson notes in his book Neither Here Nor There that "the coliseum isn't the hulking ruin that it is today because of the ravages of time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement."

One of the most interesting things about the Coliseum interior was a look at the hypogem, or the underground tunnels beneath the now non-existent arena floor. It was from these passages that animals were hoisted into the arena through trap doors.


You can see more pictures of the Coliseum at Flickr.

Roma: Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps

When in Rome, do as the Romans (and the hordes of fellow tourists) do...and at night, that means visiting either Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps.

Trevi Fountain is a beautiful and massive Baroque fountain in Rome that is a good place for getting badgered to buy worthless tourist swag and also a particularly interesting place to be on the eve of the Champions League final. We took our pictures while listening to Brits/Scots and Spaniards exchanging cheers for their teams. (Barcelona won.)



Meanwhile, the Spanish Steps are also a nice place where people go to sit, socialize, and watch others. (However, this fact from Wikipedia is revealing of their tourist credentials - they're right next to the site of the very first McDonald's in all of Italy.) The top - near the obelisk - provided more nice views of soccer fans waving their banners and sporting their jerseys.



More pictures from Rome are of course on Flickr, though there's more posts to come.

Roman Aquaducts

One morning we left the center of Rome to visit the suburbs and the aqueduct park. Everyone learns about the aqueducts in school and how the are a feat of Roman engineering. But I don't think they can be truly appreciated until you are standing up close and personal with the mammoth architectural feats.
Upon arriving at the park, I was completely blown away by the size and beauty of the aqueducts. Standing next to the endless arches, you can almost imagine them crisscrossing the Roman Empire bringing water to the city centers.
Special thanks to Ron in Rome, whose blog shared with us this great site in Rome.

The rest of our aqueduct photos can be found here.

Champions League Final in Rome

Last night in Rome we discovered that a very important soccer game, The Champions League Final, was taking place in Rome (tonight, in fact). Despite being an enormously important event in Europe (think Super Bowl), we were completely oblivious of it until a hostel mate informed us beer was no longer available to-go in the train station: a city policy aimed to help reduce the rowdiness of incoming fans.

Shortly thereafter, we began seeing (and hearing) the fans of Manchester United and Barcelona storming the city. They carried banners, wore jerseys, and excitedly headed to the hangout spots in Rome, like Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps. They emerged in the subway tunnels as if a dam had burst and we suddenly went from a world of indecipherable Italian to a world of even more indecipherable English (read: Scots). The back-and-forth cheers and the rowdiness were really getting started as night fell. They take their soccer really seriously here...a Manchester U. fan, in fact, has already been stabbed a day ahead of the game.

As "adopted Dutch," Laura and I thought the Champions League Heineken advertisements all over the city featuring a Heineken bottle Coliseum were really cool. Turns out the structure was actually in the Rome Termini! Here is the pic, with credit to djmick.co.uk:

City Irritants

I didn't grow up in the big city (or anywhere near one). It is because of this that I am still easily amused and/or irritated (but not duped) by all the begging, hustling, and trickery that goes on in the streets. Rome, like Paris or London or New York or Chicago or thousands of other cities, is full of these things.

In every city there are the classic beggars who flop down on the sidewalk. Rome has plenty of these, though it's better business for them to loiter outside a church and pretend to be entry-fee collectors. This evening, an even more clever guy busily extracted the most valuable coins from Trevi Fountain with a nifty homemade tool.

There are also plenty of goods sold on the streets of cities, and here in Rome it's mostly the usual stuff. There are fake handbags and sunglasses on every corner. Roses or tripods are seemingly shoved in our faces ("Want to buy?") a dozen times a day. Other sellers demonstrate the crappiest battery-powered toys ever made by man. We would never purchase any of these things - lest we encourage them to continue the selling - but I can at least understand why a particularly dopey tourist (or their particularly dopey children) might be interested.

But then there's the guy that approached us today at Trevi Fountain, who has seen an entirely new market opportunity. As we sat eating our gelato and quietly admiring Trevi Fountain around dusk tonight, the product shoved in my face was a ... stress-relief squeeze ball?

Yes, this particularly brilliant street entrepreneur is prepared to serve the many tourists so stressed out, they can't live another moment without their very own squeeze ball, complete with stupid painted-on face. Surely no tourist can resist the demonstration squeeze, after which they will eagerly part with their money. Not wanting to be frugal, they'll even buy one for each hand! Why, the stress is gone already! What would they have done without this buying opportunity?

Oops, got lost in the seller's fantasy land there for a second. What I meant to say is that this particularly street entrepreneur should pack his bags and head home, because I don't think things are going to work out for him.

Welcome to Italy

Laura and I have been traveling in Italy for the last week for our "summer holiday," as it is known in Europe. We started in Pisa, then trekked to the Cinque Terre, gazed at magnificent art in Florence, then visited the hill-top triumvirate of San Gimignano, Sienna, and Orvieto. Most recently, we've been seeing the sites of Rome. Pictures and more details will be coming soon, but first I'll give you my personal orientation to Italy.

Everything in Italy - particularly middle to southern Italy where we have been - exists in one (or some combination) of the following three states:

1. Disrepair
   
2. Complete abandonment
   
3. Covered in a thin layer of grime
   

As negative as all of that may sound, it all contributes to the incredible atmosphere of the country, which is frenzied and unique and friendly and (this week) blazingly hot, and yes, also obscenely beautiful. After all, how can we expect a country dotted with the remnants of "the ancients" not to be in disrepair?

We have seen the pastel buildings of the Cinque Terre clinging to hills on the oceanside, smelled the fresh lemons in the terrace groves, seen the Italian laundry wafting in the breeze from city balconies, climbed thousands of steps, eaten more gelato than should be allowed in a lifetime, walked through underground caves, stood in awe of some of the world's finest masterpieces, retraced the steps of Roman Caesars, and - most importantly - we've managed not to get anything stolen.

"Holiday" isn't the right word at all. We're on an adventure. Welcome along for the ride.