At the end of June, I got to fulfill a life long ambition of going to Rome!!  I finally persuaded my husband to take me on the grounds that we were leaving Europe soon to live in the States, and it would cost 10 times as much to visit Rome from the States than it would from the UK.  Then I told him that we could take a road trip to Rome, driving his Fiat Coupe.  That got him really excited - James Bond-esque visions of us driving a sports car on windy roads through southern France and Italy, stopping periodically to make out or engage in some sort of gun fire exchange with some Russian spies.

     The road trip turned out not to be possible, but then the idea of going was in his head, and we found a way to fly cheaply on some decent flights and stay cheaply in some decent hotels, with not just us but Abigail, Imogen and Samuel as well.  It was a miracle!

     We got there on a Tuesday evening, and by the time we got to our hotel it was fairly late - about 9pm or so.  We were hungry, so we set out to get some pizza.  The late hour wasn't a problem - in fact, Italian restaurants don't really seem to get going until about 10, so we were fine.  We found a lovely restaurant that served us each our own, giant pizza.

     The pizzas were delicious.  Pizza Hut pizzas they were not.  Thin crust, but chewy and completely gorgeous.  Incredible cheese, lots of tomatoes.  I think the only one who was able to finish it was our Samuel!  The wonders of being a growing boy.  We would all need the calories for the rest of the trip, though.  I have never walked so far or been on my feet for so long as I was for the next three days!

     In the morning after breakfast we set off for one of the most spectacular sights in all the world - the Colosseum.

 

 

It's hard to get a sense of how big the Colosseum is from looking at pictures, but Tim did a good job trying to capture the size in these photos.  The place is immense!  The minute you see it the sense of awe is overwhelming.  When you go in, you continue to be in awe because it was such an amazing feat of engineering.  And organization!  Although you can't see it in these photos, each archway has a roman numeral over the top, so that they could control how people went into the Colossuem.







     What I didn't appreciate is the amount of people that would be there.  It was heaving!  The lines to get tickets were, it seemed, miles long.  We were instantly spotted by a private tour guide the minute we got out of the subway, and he told us that he could offer us a deal where we could skip all the queues and get a private tour of both the Colosseum and Palatine hill. Tim decided to take it, and looking back I think that was the right thing to do, but it was expensive.  The current wisdom is that you need a private tour guide in Rome because there aren't a lot of signs explaining what things are. 
     Here is inside the archway:

 

     Which then leads to this view of the arena:

 

 

 

      The main arena:

 

     Although most of the stone seating has crumbled away, the whole of the Colosseum had seats all the way around, up to the very top.  The stone was covered in marble slabs, as were the floors and walls of the archways, so the whole thing must have looked incredibly grand.  The senators and other government people got the front seats - the poor people had to sit up top.  Games and events would last all day; it was a place where business was done while watching the entertainment. 

 





 
     Perhaps one of the things that impressed me the most was the stage floor.  Beneath the floor there was a whole network of several stories of individual cells where they kept the animals that would be fighting the gladiators, and later, where they kept the Christians who would be brought here to be killed.  As you can see from these pictures, the stage was removable, so they could bring these animals up from beneath directly onto the stage. 

     Sometime in the 1800's, one of the popes put a cross in the Colosseum to honor and remember all the Christians who died here, being persecuted because of their beliefs.

    Here's the passage through the main archway around the Colosseum.  This would have been covered in marble, with torches burning high upon the walls every couple of meters.

 

     The thing that struck me the most was how modern Ancient Rome was in some ways, and yet so totally removed from us in other ways.  The Colosseum really does look just like a huge football stadium, and in a way the layout felt very familiar.  And the phenomena of politicians doing their business while going to a sporting event is something we still do today.  But what a sporting event!  Killing was the name the of game - not just animals, but people.  Of course we have violent movies and video games, and those lead to a host of evils, but it still isn't the same as watching a state-sponsored event in which people are killed, in real life, for fun.  I love learning about the Romans, but there is so much about them that I simply cannot understand.