June 10, 9:30 am, Home B&B
Exciting news! (Drum roll please...) I slept for almost 12 hours last night!!! Ok, yeah maybe I'm a little overly excited about that, but considering the night before sleep was hard to come by, I am very happy. Now I have time to eat, relax for a bit, and get ready for our adventure today.
June 10, 12:00 pm, Palatine Hill
After standing in line for about 30 minutes in front of two amusing female lawyers from London, England (yes, Alfred struck up a conversation with them, no, I wasn't surprised that he did), we finally were able purchase tickets and enter to see Palatine Hill. The ruins in this area included several different houses, courtyards, temples, and at one point it was home to the palace of Nero. Some of the ruins had very beautiful flowers planted in some intricate patterns along with colored stone. It was really lovely. We also went into the Palatine Museum, which houses some of the artifacts found in the area. The museum was fairly small, but it was interesting to see some of the different sculptures, tiles, and pottery that had been found.
June 10, 1:30 pm, Roman Forum
The Roman Forum is adjacent to Palatine Hill. In order to get to the Forum, you can go through an underground passage built by Nero. When we arrived at the passage, we actually went through the wrong way and had to walk back around, but we eventually arrived at the Forum. I don't know what exactly I was expecting the Forum to look like, but it wasn't what I saw. There were ruins of several temples, the Senate building, which was still in pretty good shape, the Vestral Virgin's temple area, several monuments to represent various things, arches to commemorate events such as Rome's conquer of Judea, just a whole mishmash of things in different levels of ruin.
June 10, 3:00 pm, Colosseum
The Colosseum is COLOSSAL! So huge. At this point I was getting pretty tired, so I waited in the shade while Alfred ran up to a nearby street that was higher than the level of the base of the Colosseum to take some pictures. Thankfully, we did not then have to wait in the extensive line to get tickets since our Palatine Hill ticket also worked for the Colosseum. We were able to get inside within a matter of minutes.
The entire floor of the Colosseum has long since been either removed or been stripped away by time, and as you look at the arena you can see the passageways where prisoners, animals, and gladiators were housed and led to the arena. It was a little freaky to think about all of the many martyrs who had given their lives here for Christ throughout the years of Roman persecution. They had rebuilt a small portion of the floor to give an idea of what the whole thing would have looked like, as well as a small portion of the seating where the emperor and honored guests would have sat. This thing was incredibly large, and that's just counting the parts that still remain today. Apparently there used to be a sort of awning that covered most of it, three layers of walls, and just a whole lot of passageways, stairs, and seating.
June 10, 5:00 pm, Home B&B
Thankful to be back for the evening. Since our bus from near the metro to our B&B does not run on Sundays, we had to walk up the incredibly steep hill, but we did make it back. I feel much better (and cleaner) since I was able to shower and wash my hair, and now we're making pasta for dinner. Yum! Plus, I get to chat with amazing friends tonight as well!!!! SOOOO excited!
No comments:
Post a Comment