Pizza by the Etto

Coliseum by dusk

Coliseum by night

Coliseum by day

The Coliseum was far from my favorite thing in Rome, but I think it shows up quite majestically in pictures, so I'll lead this post with shots of it. Here, eat your hearts out.

The Coliseum comes packaged with the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill/Museum. We were unlucky to visit while the museum was closed unexpectedly for urgent repairs and the ticket sellers did not tell us that. No discount despite one of the three things in the deal being closed. Caveat emptor, I suppose.

The Coliseum was the first and would be the only time on the whole trip I felt like I wanted a tour (or audio) guide. Not so much because I am uneducated on the purpose and history of the Coliseum, but because over half of the wonder is closed to you without a tour guide, including the 3rd and basement floors which are the fun parts. If you can afford it, I highly recommend signing up for a guided tour when you visit the Coliseum. You may also want a guide for the Roman Forum, depending on your knowledge of ancient Roman life; otherwise, it might just look like a bunch of organized rubble - such is the trouble with many a ruin, of course.

Read on for some of, what I consider, more interesting parts of Italy's capital, including the Forum.

A good look into the basement level

A small museum to explore inside the Coliseum around the perimeter

Rome's skyline is speckled with churches.

Pretty unique, really, but I'd say less interesting than the Santorini blue caps

Poor photo quality but hopefully you think this nightly projection of ancient Roman figures in the Forum are as cool as I did.

When I last left you, Phil and I were boarding a very early flight from Crete to Rome. My butt was being torn to shreds. It was not pleasant. Working on what little sleep we could get in the airport and on the plane, we made the trek to our expensive Rome hostel. The gentlemen at Funny Palace Hostel were not very funny, but they were very helpful. We told them we had three days in Rome and they outlined the path we should take each day. The cartoony map they gave us was indeed useful, but we basically laughed at how limited they made each of our days. As I recall Phil lamenting at the end of the first night, our problem is that we move so quickly that we see everything in one day and then have nothing to do.

We did walk almost the whole city in that first day, no exaggeration, even after having lost hours by taking a good nap in the park. We could have seen the city in total had we not gotten held up by a free city concert at Piazza del Popolo featuring some Italian singer celebrity named Giorgia. We didn't actually know who we were listening to at any point in the concert, but Phil's keen ears later recalled a song from the performance that played twice during the rest of our time in Italy, so we looked it up. Check out Credo by Giorgia if you care about Italian pop music.

From behind the concert stage in the piazza

Fontana del Nettuno, featuring Neptune and two Tritons

Trinità dei Monti at the Piazza di Spagna

Some weird restaurant-museum hybrid

Following history, Rome was the natural place to land ourselves after Greece, as European power shifted from one land to the other around turn of the millennium. After seeing all Greece has to offer, I found myself rather bored with Roman architecture - Italians were always thieves and copycats of every other civilizations with a hint of originality and the only reason we care about Italy is because they were militarily dominant.

Italy's Supreme Court

Strolled by this after the concert and I was awestruck.

The front of the building is lined with marble statues of famous legislators and judges.

Roman buildings beyond the extant ancient ones are largely dull. That said, three of the most interesting buildings on my whole trip are in Rome, St. Peter's Basilica, Altare della Patria, and the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. (Florence has a building with top billing - wait for the Florence post to see it)

From the river in front of the Supreme Court, you get a good view of the Vatican.
We enter the Vatican on the third day.

Past the river, we got to the Altar of the Fatherland.

I love this horse statue. I return here in daylight later.

We started our second day in Rome with a museum, the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. And let me tell you: if you weren't tired of marble statues after Greece, you will be after Rome. They quite literally litter the museums with these statues. Growing up in America, I got the feeling that marble statues are a rarity - and I think most Americans feel the same. Seeing one in a museum earns oohs and aahs. These statues just aren't anything special to me anymore; they are a dime a dozen. Occasionally there is a spectacularly well-preserved or detailed or majestic statue, but aside from those you shouldn't waste your camera roll. I bring to you the most eye-catching. Some bronze and ivory statues exist, but marble are far and away most numerous. Believe me, toga-clad chiseled men in chiseled marble gets old.

A couple discobolus statues

So much detail on a sarcophagus

A whole section of the museum for frescoes

And another section for coins. Made me glad to have not paid for the numismatic museum in Athens.

A neighboring building incorporates a museum into the Roman Bath.

People used to bath in these depressed floors.

Cratere Colossale garden: the best example of excessive numbers of statues.
Perhaps difficult to make out any in this photo, statues line the whole square border underneath the arches.

It was summertime in Italy, nearing the end of June, and with that comes peak tourist season. I never felt particularly cramped by other tourists though. That isn't really something you should worry about if planning to travel to Europe, except in cases where you need to book tickets/tours ahead of time. What I would worry about though is the heat. As if our bodies weren't worn out enough, the heat in Italy hit us like nowhere else. Bring appropriate dress and sunscreen.

First some random archaeological dig we walked past.

Then we swung around the Roman Forum, but did not enter yet.

One of the challenges of Italy as a whole, Rome in particular, was keeping costs down. This place hits your budget, even more than Paris (but not as much as Switzerland, I would later discover). You're expected to eat as the Italians do, which implies primi and secondi. And what those words really mean is a small helping of pasta, followed by a small course of meat, combining to make an average taste, average size meal for 20 bucks.

We learned that paying for slices of pizza by weight is actually the cheapest way to eat decently. You could get positively stuffed on 5€ that way. A hectogram, somehow translated into Italian as etto, of pizza costs between a buck and a buck fifty. As pita in Greece, so too pizza in Italy. DYK pita used to be spelled with two t's? The etymological connection between pita and pizza is then easy to see. And what is pizza really besides an unfurled pita sandwich?

For commemoration's sake, let me write that we laughed really hard at a seagull. This seagull thought it was so smart, ripping through a plastic trash bag, scuttling away when shooed by some passerby, and then returning to his feast once the man was gone. One of our funniest moments of the trip. Stupid humor for two totally normal guys.

This is all that remains of the Circus Maximus now.

People use it for running regular old laps now instead of bloody charioteer laps.

On the third and final day in Rome, Phil and I hit our breaking point, the Great Schism for this trip as some might call it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna give the any church my money. Phil didn't have as strong of a qualm with the Catholics though, so we split up at the Vatican, not seeing each other until bedtime. This day was the only time we had significantly different conceptions of what to see.

Early in the morning, he waited in line for the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel at the cost of 15€. I partook in the free entry to St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica. Neither of us saw the Pope. I did see women (nuns?) on what looked to be a pilgrimage to the Basilica dressed in all sorts of colors. I saw men (priests?) dressed in black, grey, and green. I still haven't looked up the meaning of their colors, but I will soon. Or maybe one of you can explain it to me.

Silly looking Swiss Guard

As you will see in these pictures, St. Peter's Basilica is one of the most absurdly ornate, lavish, and extravagant buildings in the world, condensed into a very large church. So much is plated in gold, floor to ceiling. You can definitely put your Latin to the test in here reading the walls. 

Listen closely in my video below for the Catholic version of the Hymn of the Fayth. Not as pretty as Nobuo Uematsu's work.

After leaving the Vatican, I walked around the entire country. Obviously the Vatican isn't big, but I don't believe many people can say they have walked around a whole country, even one as small as the Vatican. There is absolutely nothing of interest on the south, west, or north sides. There's no reason for you to walk around it other than to say you did, so save your steps. Not even noon yet, and my feet were already starting to hurt. I feared for how well I could hold up on the rest of the trip.

Walked away from the Vatican on Ponte Sant'Angelo. Turned around for a shot of the Castel Sant'Angelo.

The Pantheon was very underwhelming.

Inside the Pantheon, blinded by the skylight.

I wanted to stop in a couple small museums at this point, but they are closed on Mondays. Good thing we entered the better museums over the weekend. I wasn't complaining too much about this mistake, because I had so much to knock off on this final day anyway. Time to return to Altare della Patria, and then hit the Roman Forum and the Coliseum.

Love this horse!

And now under the sweltering heat, I hit the Forum which provides next to nothing in terms of shade. I don't know how interesting any of these pictures will be to you, because ruins don't look like much, but I loved my time in this area. I think I spent three hours strolling through. There's a lot of "nothing" to see here, even if you have no idea what's going on, so it wasn't hard to use up a quarter of my day.

Temple of Saturn (Zeus): hard to see here but inscribed at the top with Senatus Populusque Romanus

The standing sets of pillars were once part of temples dedicated to various gods, as with the Temple of Saturn in the previous photo.

And that's Rome for ya. I went to the Coliseum next, but I gave those pictures to you at the start of the post. Through Greece and Rome, all I wanted to do was play God of War and Herc's Adventures, and watch Gladiator and Disney's Hercules.

The next day was spent in Naples and Pompeii, but I'm going to cover Florence first so that I can set the scene for Naples, Pompeii, and Pisa all at once. It'll make more sense when I get there.

What else... oh, I heard somebody exclaim "Mamma mia!" unironically. And I had my first run-in with a bidet here. At the time I was thinking one of the following must be the case: either bidets are worthless, I'm an idiot that doesn't know how to operate bidets, or my hostel's bidet is defunct. But after seeing what technology can achieve with the high-tech bidets of Japan, I now know Italy just has old, weak and worthless bidets.

Let me quickly catch you up on my real time status. I got back from Japan a week ago, spent a weekend plus at a family reunion, and now I have done almost nothing for a couple days and finally worked up the energy to post again. My goal is to post every second day until I finish cataloging this trip. I expect remaining topics to include:

1. Florence
2. Naples/Pompeii/Pisa
3. Venice
4. Paris
5. Basel
6. Lucerne
7. Munich
8. Bern/Zurich
9. Tokyo
10. Kyoto

With one of ten cities coming out every two days, and today being August 4, I will finish a day before my birthday. Yay, what a good present to give myself.

But I do not expect that to be the end of my blog. I certainly have bonus topics lined up for you, including goodies like a trip summary, advice on how to do your own American and international travels, my long-dreaded political rant, my favorite songs that carried me through all the trains and planes, photo highlights, and updates on my thrilling job hunt. So don't go anywhere!

And a horse peered down from the heavens...