Rome

The first thing I noticed about Italy flying into Rome’s Fiumicino airport, (I first tried to remember this as Foo Man Chu airport, but now know it means little river in Italian),   were the umbrella pines and the wheat fields below.  The airport is well outside the city center.  One remarkable thing about Italy is that the cities are densely packed very often within ancient walls and in between the cities is open countryside with no suburban sprawl. 

Our Airbnb host sent a friend to pick us up and bring us into Rome.  The driver’s name was Danielle.  He spoke almost no English but he was friendly and we tried to converse in my broken Italian and his broken English.  It was about a 45 minute ride on fairly conventional, open highways until we reached the city where the streets are narrow and confusing, at least to us.  We drove down a street, paved with stone that ran along a massive wall that ran as far as we could see.  Our apartment was half a block off this street. 

The Mura Aureliane, or Aurelian’s wall gave us our first impression of Rome.  It is massive, maybe 50 feet tall with stone houses and towers on top, and trees and bushes growing out of the cracks.  The entrances to the city through the wall are worthy of an empire in its glory.  The wall completely encircles the old city. 

The Termini station was a ten minute walk along the wall from where we were.  From here you could take a train to another city or get on the subway system to go anywhere inside Rome. 

 Our first full day we used the Metro to explore the city.  We first went to the Colosseum where there were hundreds of tourists waiting in line and many guide businesses who would sign you up to cut the line and give a guided tour of both the Colosseum and the Forum.  We paid them maybe forty Euros for each of us.  Our first guide spoke pretty good English and she  brought  us into the Arena explaining many things as we walked along listening to her on little disposable earphones.  These tours are useful if you have no idea at all where you are or what you’re looking at, which essentially, at least I, did not.  If I went back, I would first read about these places, make notes about what I wanted to  see, buy the tickets in advance and then explore on my own.   But, all in all, the tours were not bad. 

The Colosseum itself is of course, an impressive work of engineering and design.  It is however dark.  And I say this in both senses of the word.  The old stone, except where it has been cleaned, is blackened, and inside between the outer wall of arches and the inner wall of arches it is also dark and dreary.  The viewing areas look out onto the maze of rooms that had been the staging area for the spectacles that took place above on a wooden floor which had been covered with sand to absorb the blood, (thus the word arena, its first meaning is sand).  Here the crowds could watch gladiators fight to the death or see criminals being fed alive to starving lions and tigers.  It is thus perhaps the world’s largest monument to the brutality of mankind.

The Colosseum is within site of the Palatine hill and the Roman Forum.   These are the ruins of the heart of the Roman empire that date from 600 BC to 700 AD.  The Forum is hard to describe.  It is as if someone had taken the buildings of a thousand years of imperial Rome and dumped them together in a junkyard.