My Heart Belongs to Rome…

Sleeper trains are a pain in the backside! There’s not much space when you cram 6 people into one tiny car in 6 tiny bunk beds. Yvette and I were fortunate enough to be assigned the top bunks, so at least we had enough room to sit up, but it was quite stuffy. Also, we kept waking up every time the train stopped. It was one of those automatic things, like when the car stops at the end of a long trip and the lack of movement wakes sleeping passengers. Only we still had hours and hours left to go. And people (*cough*males*cough*) apparently have more difficulty…erm…hitting the target, so to speak, when the floor is moving beneath them, because the bathrooms got really gross really fast.

The problem with this (at least when you are particular about hygiene) is that in most of Europe, apparently, use of public restrooms costs about 3 Euros. (Oh America, with your free toilets every which way, I do so miss you!!! ) This is especially problematic when you don’t have any Euros on you! So it was a pretty high priority for us to find a place to stay (and thereby get access to a bathroom) as soon as we got off the train.

We found a quaint little hotel, with free wifi (finally!!!), and got ourselves situated. We were then ready to go play tourist. The receptionist guy was particularly helpful, giving us a walking map and telling us what our options were within a ten minute walk of the hotel. Because it is my lifelong dream to see it, and because it was so so so close, the coloseum was our choice. (meaning I casually said, “the coloseum’s pretty close.” And Yvette said, “yeah, we can do that” and I said “you’re so my best friend!” I might have thrown a little happy dance in there somewhere too.) But before we could go sightseeing, we had to find food.

The thing to understand here is that Yvette and I had been so stressed and busy on this trip up until this point, that we hadn’t been very hungry. We were averaging about 1 “meal” a day (usually a sandwich) supplemented by a lot of water , a little chocolate, and some snack bars. By the time we got settled in Rome and relaxed, we were starving. So off we went to see if all the stories we’d heard about Italian food was true. We found a little restaurant not far from our hotel (not difficult to find) that wasn’t terribly expensive (pretty difficult) and also allowed us to sit down (in combination with previous quality, extremely difficult). Yvette ordered the lasagna, and I ordered a pizza, because I’d heard they were amazing in Italy. Both were actually extremely good, despite the very oily quality of the lasagna, and the extremely thin (think tortilla) crust of my pizza. Also, the restaurant was really cute.

Then it was off to play tourist. The walk was not terribly exciting, although we decided we like the architecture here in Rome almost as much as that in Paris, and we both love the feel of the city. The weather here is HOT! right now, so we were sort of eyeing the gilato longingly as we went, but passed it by like good little tourists who are poor, and lack the correct form of currency anyway.

The first sight of the coloseum was…unexpected. We turned a corner, thinking we still had quite a walk ahead of us, and there it was. I…might have jumped around a bit. I might have been a little bit in love with Rome even before (like, years before) I ever stepped foot on Roman soil. So I might have been a little excited. Pictures may have been taken. Then we…walked for awhile. We were just planning to buy tickets to get inside and then look around a bit, but when we got there, there was a tour being offered for something like four Euros more (a piece) than the normal ticket price and, as they also accepted both pounds and dollars (which we did have), and were including a tour of the nearby palatine hill, we were all over that.
Our tour guide, who was Roman, was determined to convince us that the Romans weren’t all bad, despite the horrible things that took place in the coloseum. He pointed out the brilliance of the architecture, the niches in the walls where the posts holding up the cloth used as sun protection for spectators used to be mounted, the fact that there was always free food for all spectators (even the poor ones), and that the only people killed were those condemned to die anyway. Personally, I didn’t feel any better about their method of granting that death, nor the bloodthirsty way the entire culture was obsessed with watching it, but it was interesting to hear the facts and stories from a completely new perspective. And I did learn a few things I hadn’t heard before, like the fact that the Romans chose the plays and stories they reenacted in the coloseum for a reason: each one was specifically tailored to the crime committed by the person being executed. For example, a favorite for the execution of Christians was a reenactment of the punishment of Prometheus (the god who gave fire to humans) because he committed the ultimate betrayal against the other gods and was punished by them. The Romans thought it was fitting that Christians, who committed the ultimate betrayal of refusing to worship Caesar, should be similarly punished.

The building itself is amazing. When you first come into the coloseum, you step right into the spot where the emperor’s box used to be, which I thought was interesting. They’ve placed a cross there to commemorate all the Christians who were killed in the coloseum (I found its placement extremely ironic). A lot of the upper levels are missing due to an earthquake back in the day, but they have reconstructed part of the floor and left the rest of the underground chambers exposed so that you can see what it looked like underneath. They also let you look at it from two different levels, so you can see the underground stuff more clearly.

Anyway, after the coloseum, we had a few minutes wait until our tour of the palatine hill was to start. I snagged a water bottle, and Yvette got a chocolate gilato that she said was just horrible. She ate it anyway (because it was HOT!) and we spent the next few minutes fending off vendors trying to sell us scarves, fans, necklaces and parasols. It was a little difficult because they pretend not to understand English very well until someone actually buys something from one of them, and then, all of a sudden: clarity!

Palatine hill was very different. For one thing, I had never heard of it before, so everything I was seeing and hearing was brand new. Supposedly, this hill was where Romulus founded the city of Rome and built his house. The hill then became the “place to live” for Roman nobility. After that, Emperor Domitian, brother and successor of Emperor Titus, bought all the land there, tore down all the houses, and built his palace and gardens. We got to see the ruins of his private stadium, the second story of his private rooms, his banquet hall, and his throne room. Apparently he was so paranoid about assassins that he had the marble in the public areas of his palace polished to a reflective shine so he could see someone coming up behind him (ironically, it was his wife who killed him later). The tour guide also taught us a bit about the different types of marble used in ancient Rome (one of which, the porphyry, the emperor’s marble, existed only in one vein in the Egyptian desert and was exhausted by the Roman emperors and now no longer exists outside of Roman relics. This marble is so hard that it would take 1 hour today to cut 3 centimeters into it with a diamond cutter), and how it was attached to the walls (which is why so many Roman ruins, including the coloseum, have giant holes in the walls all over—they used to be covered in marble held to the walls by nails and concrete).

From the top of the hill we were also able to see the ruins of several temples, including Romulus (not the founder of Rome but the other), the vestal virgins (who had more rights than any other women in Rome; they were allowed to own land, make wills, ride in chariots, pardon condemned men they met on the street, and other unheard of privileges), and Julius Caesar (people still bring flowers to his temple). We were also able to see the Via Sacra, ancient Rome’s main street (I walked it!), marked by the Arch of Titus (built to commemorate the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.) and the Arch of Septimus Severus. This is the path of the Roman Triumph, where the army’s victory parades took place (they began in the coloseum, went under the arch of Titus to the Arch of Septimus Severus and from there to the former Roman bank/mint, where the spoils of war were then deposited.

After our tours, we went looking for a place to eat dinner. It was sevenish, the sun was already going down, and apparently Rome closes down early because 2/3s of the shops and diners we’d passed in the afternoon were now closed. We did find a nice outdoor restaurant and ordered rice with some kind of cream sauce and scampi (thinking, rice = healthy and scampi = protein). While we waited, some guy came by with an accordion and totally serenaded the customers eating there. I had this “Lady and the Tramp” flashback, it was such an Italian stereotype. The food, unfortunately, was not nearly so great this time around. For one thing, there was this giant clawed thing in my rice, with antennae and broken legs scattered throughout (gross!). The fact that there was very little shrimp meat in that monster meant that there was nothing to make up for the gross factor either. The rice itself was kind of weird too, so to make up for it, we ordered gilato. We wanted chocolate, but our waiter, who spoke at least 3 languages (English, Italian and Japanese) and had refused to let us order fruit salad earlier in the meal, brought us these giant dishes of 3 types of gilato, including chocolate. The strawberry flavor was so not my favorite, but the lemon was good, and the chocolate was fabulous.


Overall, we really love Rome. Tomorrow we plan to go see the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica, just as soon as we’ve run a few errands (read: figured out how to get to Venice, and then how to get to London, without paying through the nose. Train tickets are suddenly impossible to find!) We’re excited about that tour, especially the Sistine Chapel, but we’re also looking forward to our trip to Venice. I’ll be sad to leave Rome, but Venice will be wonderful too (the plan there is to sit, relax, take time off, drink some coffee, maybe take a gondola ride, and enjoy our final day of non-law school freedom, so I can’t say I’m disappointed about it).