Italy #3: Do as the Romans do

So after more than 1500km taking in Milan, the Lakes, Florence and Tuscany, we finally arrived in the Italian capital. Dropping the car at the airport (driving in Rome is not advised), we took a taxi into the city and checked in at the Hotel Villa San Pio.

Rome is literally filled with history - at every turn there is some ancient relic of the great empire, and considering how old it all is, most things are remarkably well preserved.  Wasting no time, we set out on foot and headed for the Colosseum which was only a 15 minute walk away.  We opted for the fast track tickets which paid off as the queues to get in were as epic as the battles that once played out here.

The Colosseum

It's hard to overstate the magnificence of the Colosseum - it is imposing, captivating and far larger than you'd imagine from looking at pictures. It's open to walk around both at the arena floor level, and higher up, and as you wander around you can really start to imagine what it must have been like sitting in the crowd cheering on Russell Crowe.

The Colosseum was finished in 80 AD and once held up to 80,000 people.  The area beneath the arena floor is on show and you can see the complex of rooms where wild animals, gladiators and other barbaric things were raised up and down into the arena to please the crowds. Some pretty clever early engineering, not to mention the structure itself - just how did they build it?

The River Tiber

After taking in the atmosphere in the low afternoon sun for a while, we wandered on into the city, past the Roman Forum and on up to the Piazza Venezia.

The next morning we set off on the metro and into the city. With so much to see in Rome we had to be selective, but one of the 'must sees' in this city is the Trevi fountain. Tradition states that a coin thrown into the fountain brings luck, but unfortunately when we arrived the fountain was covered in scaffolding for restoration work, and dry as well. We deposited our lucky coin and headed onwards to the Pantheon, one of Rome's best preserved antiquities.

The Pantheon

We did a tour inside and outside of the building that was built the best part of 2000 years ago.  Originally a temple and now used as a church,  the building is another engineering marvel that has experts baffled about how it was built.  The structure features the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome, complete with oculus that lets light (and rain) enter.  Beautiful on the inside, the exterior is looking a bit worse for wear, with much of the original exterior cladding of marble and bronze pilfered over the years for use in other buildings in the city.

St Peter's Basilica

One of Rome's biggest attractions is St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.  The world's smallest independent state, a city within a city, the Vatican has it's own postal service, telephone system and a population of less than 850 people.

To beat the much documented queues, on our last day we were up and out on the metro before 7am.  When we arrived we pretty much had St. Peter's Square to ourselves. It was a beautiful clear morning and the church, the grandest and richest in the Catholic world, look pretty spectacular towering over the square. Inside, it's like nothing I've seen before - vast marble, gold everywhere, statues by Michelangelo and others - a pretty incredible sight. Completed in 1626 and one of the largest churches in the world, there are 91 dead popes buried here in the Vatican grottos.

After a couple of hours we moved on to the Vatican museums. A vast complex, if you spent one minute looking at every item on show you'd be there for twelve years. Without that sort of time to spare, we opted for the greatest hits tour that took in the Raphael Rooms and the Gallery of Maps (pretty good cartographers those Italians), culminating in the bit everyone wants to see, the Sistine Chapel.

The Gallery of Maps

Despite being absolutely packed full of people when we got there, the room is breathtaking, with frescoes covering the ceiling and every wall. The audio guide came in handy to decipher what was going on but it seems there is still a lot of mystery behind some of the paintings, debates about which will no doubt continue for centuries to come. Photos inside the Sistine Chapel are banned for that very reason - to prevent camera flash from damaging the frescos. Either that or to maintain the healthy sales of postcards outside....

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  We didn't take this photo, honest...

After rewarding ourselves with lunch after an exhausting morning of walking, we wandered back along that Tiber and through the city once more. We enjoyed a typical Roman meal for dinner that evening, and made acquaintance with a grumpy waiter who insisted that we'd been pronouncing 'grazie' incorrectly for the last two weeks...


All in all it had had been a fantastic holiday, a real mixture of city, countryside, culture and food, with a lots of ground covered in a reasonably short space of time. There's much more to see though and Venice, the Amalfi coast and Naples will have to wait until next time...

Ciao!