Roman Highlights

Palatino Hill - ruins of old city houses.
see all photos »

Today we headed out into the city of Rome to hit some of the big ones: the ancient ruins of Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon.

To get to the city it's about a half an hour train ride. The more we use Italian public transport, the more we realize how awful and inefficient it is. Not to mention the inside and outside of the trains are covered head to foot in graffiti. It really is a pain trying to get anywhere, so mostly we try to do it all by foot. Fortunatly the service matches the price however, as it only costs one euro for the whole trip.

Beautiful ruins infront of panoramic views of the city.

Palatino Hill from afar.
see all photos »

Our first destination was Palatine Hill. This is said to be the birth of Roman culture as they know it. We've only ever seen pictures of the place before, and we really had no idea how large it was. We spent a good two hours just walking around the place! While most of the buildings are quite deteriorated by now, the sight is no less spectacular. At the top we faced beautiful ruins infront of panoramic views of the city. There was also a museum where they kept many of the statues found in the city to avoid any further damage or vandalism. We liked that they had very good crowd control for the area. It did mean you have to wait a while to get in, but it's deffinatly worth it considering how nice it was to be able to finally take a picture of something important without someone getting in the way. Overall it was just a really neat experience.

A fountain in the underground of the ancient city.
see all photos »

Palatine Hill is right next to the Colosseum, so we headed there next. On our way we witnessed something a little bit fishy. Our Europe guide book was kind enough to list some of the frequent scams played upon tourists, including a popular "police scam". A man starts to harass a tourist and suddenly out pops some "under cover cops" who quickly handcuff him and take him away. One of the cops stays behind and declares that the tourists are witnesses, and he will need to see their documents straight away. Long story short, one of those documents seems to go missing in the flustering process, cops take off in a rush, and there you have it. We unfortunatly may have witnessed just that as we were heading out of the main gates. Of course we can't say for sure, but the whole situation was very unnerving.

One of the statues from the Palatino Museum.
see all photos »

So after that event we headed over to "Cafe Cafe" to grab some sandwiches, and then to the Colesseum. Overall it's a very impressive sight, but sadly crowd control wasn't as good as at Palatine. They are doing some restoritive work on the Colessum, and apparently have been for some years, to bring it back to it's original form. So far the going is slow, they've barely done an eighth of the arena floor, and that is all they've started. We're afraid this will probably be like the Sagrada Familia - something we wont see completed in our lifetimes.

The Colosseum from the outside.
see all photos »

Next was the Pantheon. This attraction was free and so it was completely packed full, of course. The dome itself is really impressive - it's hard to imagine something that beautiful and complex being created without our modern machines, created strictly by hand.

We then began the long haul back to the train station. It's really quaint to walk along the streets here. We especially enjoyed the large presense of Nuns in the city. It was also funny to see lots of shops for priests and nun's clothing.

Inside the Colosseum.
see all photos »

Tomorrow we're heading into Vatican city. Unfortunatly the pope won't be out, he only greets people on Wednesdays. None the less we hope it will be as interesting as today.