With sore feet and heavy hearts from the news the night before, we let ourselves sleep in this morning. We took the day relatively easy. Our agenda today was primarily to see “the sights.”
First things first, though, we had to go about the business of finding a place to print our plane tickets. For some reason, RyanAir insists that you print your tickets. We aimed for a printing place we’d found on Google, but it was not there. In the scorching sun, we hiked around the streets trying to find another one and finally stopped in at a hotel where the clerk graciously agreed to print them for us.
Our first stop was the Roman Forum. This was essentially the “downtown” of ancient Rome. We had another audio tour from Rick Steves which really helped to understand what we were looking at. We spent the majority of the time sitting on a toppled column gazing at the ruins and listening to stories of Julius Cesar’s betrayal and death, the Vestal Virgins’ punishment if they became “unchaste,” the Jewish diaspora, and more. What was most fascinating to me was how much of what we now know as part of Catholicism had its roots in Ancient Rome. For example, the courthouses they called Basilicas. Because nearly every town had a Basilica already, turning those into churches helped the spread of Christianity around the Roman world. Especially impressive considering that only 100 years before it became the official religion of Rome, being a Christian was a crime punishable by death.
From here we hiked up Palatine Hill where all of the Emperors built their palaces. Having seen Hadrian’s palace yesterday and with the midday sun scorching (my sandals literally stuck to the ground if I stood still too long), we didn’t feel too bad about ducking into the museum that featured artwork recovered from the palaces. In all honesty, seeing these artifacts really helped me understand the evolution of the role of the Emperors from one to another – through their tastes in art.
We’d neglected to eat yet and figured we ought to do that before heading on to the Colosseum. The water misters on the sidewalk cafe near the ruins drew us in. We had some mediocre, overpriced pizza, but there was a LOT of it, so we ended up not needing to eat for the rest of the day!
Finally, we made our way to the Colosseum. The lines at this time of day were graciously shorter than earlier in the day and we were able to get in relatively quickly. Listening to another audio tour, we found shade and took in the hugeness of the space.
We thought it’d be nice to end the day at a park and overheard a guide talking about the old horse racing area, the Circus Maximus, and headed that way. Unfortunately, Rome is not known for its soft green grass. After a couple minutes tromping through dusty, prickly grass in search of a shade tree to no avail, we turned back. Romans apparently do not care for people to sit down: we passed through three other parks with no benches before finally finding one that worked.
Ray got a text message about an urgent issue at work, so we headed back. I showered (boy, did we get grimy!) while Ray worked. At sunset, we went to grab a couple glasses of wine at the little place across the street and toasted our last night in Rome.