When in Rome…

Wow, what a day we had today and what a way to spend day 12 of our tour. We started this morning in Tuscany at 8am; once again too early for Nic and I. We took a nice group photo before piling onto the bus for another 5 hour trip.

As you can guess we made a stop in 2 hours, then another stop in 1.5 hours at an Autogrill. We have all become very familiar with how to eat and purchase at an Autogrill. One thing they do differently is that you have to pay first before you get food. So, for a sandwich, you figure out the name of the one you want then you go to a register, which isn’t near the sandwiches, pay for your sandwich then go back and give it to a deli worker. The goal is to reduce contamination because money is so dirty. The food is fine but as I stated before I think it’s too many stops. Why not just leg out the 3.5 hours to one stop?

Either way, the bus ride was nice. We gave our driver, Ben, some grapa and jam from the hotel in Tuscany along with a card that we all signed. He was a great driver and it was sad to see him go. He dropped us very close, less than 1 block, from our hotel in the middle of Rome. He is heading back to Belgium (1500 km away) for 4 days off before he’s back on the road.

Mom, dad, please skip ahead to the next line as I am going to curse…..okay you were warned. ……HOLY SHIT BALLS WE ARE IN ROME!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, Rome. Wow! What an amazing city and we’ve barely begun our time here. Our day today consisted of a 3.5 hour walking tour through the Colesseum, The Forum, Michaelangelo’s Square and the Pantheon followed by dinner in a Piatza, a nice walk to get some gelato and finally a walk back to the hotel.

First, the walking tour. All I can say is that it was outstanding. Our guide was the best one yet. She combined the new Rome with the Ancient Rome to really paint a picture of this city. The Colesseum was everything I had hoped it to be plus an odd smell of horse urin. BONUS!!!!! They have horse carriages outside the Colesseum that you can ride, the drawback is that they pee right on the walkway and horse pee smells. But, the Colesseum makes up for it.

It’s old but that’s just the start of it. What I didn’t know is that in it’s hayday it would have been colorful. Marble would have coated a lot of the building and it would not have been white as I was taught, it would have been red, green, blue, white and black. Some areas would have had painted plaster that covered the bricks. And, they built the whole thing in only 8 years! Pretty amazing stuff.

The guide also showed us that there would have been a roof of sorts on the top made of  sales that would have been teathered to the ground. Like the pyramids in Egypt they do not know how they would have done it and we can’t figure it out BUT they do know it existed. I find that fascinating….they can do it 2000 years ago but they can’t do it today.

The Forum is just as impressive as the Colesseum. We learned that the area of the Forum would flood from the Tiber River, filling it in after it was abandoned. Again the guide showed us images of what the Forum would have looked like with pilars, shops, political spaces and tons of statues. She worded it very well. Rome was filled with amazing clutter because people didn’t have news or tvs or the internet. There weren’t photos or video to prove that they dominated the world. What they DID have were buildings. They could create HUGE buildings that said to anyone coming into Rome “look at us. Look at what we can build, what we can achieve. How could we not dominate the world? Don’t even try to conquer our lands.” That makes a lot of sense when you think about the Roman times.

Onto the Pantheon. Another amazing architectural achievement of the Romans. I was so happy to get to see all of these things in 1 day. The Pantheon is 143ft across and 143ft tall. You can fit a perfect sphere inside of it and the building itself is just magnificient. It is cool to see that the Romans removed portions of the concrete roof to make it lighter. Building materials and the thickness of the dome change as it gets higher as well.

The walk to the Trevi fountain was very nice. We went down some small side streets and stopped at a great gelato place calle Gilliti. The gelato was the best we’ve had yet and I chose to get chocolate and mint chip. The mint was neon green. I mean bright, neon like you’d see on a 10 year old’s bike. The chocolate was a deep rich color and combined they tasted great.

The almost 300 year old Trevi fountain is cool to say the least. Yeah, it is crowded and yeah, we saw a guy get arrested for digging change out of the pool and yeah we threw coins in but hey, when in Rome…

So, all in all today was a really good day. Nana is doing well, they’ll be moving her to a rehab facility tomorrow and things are looking up. It’s been a long couple of days but the weather and company have been amazing. It’s going to be sad to leave the tour in 2 days but also relieving because we’ll have our own time schedules back.

I am uploading a TON of new pictures to Flickr. Over 300 for the past 3 days. I put them into sets for Florence, Tuscany and Rome. You can see our sets here. As always pictures take a while to upload here so be patient. You’ll see Tuscany then Florence then Rome. My guess is they should be done by 4pm PST.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts, comments and calls about Nana. Nic, Nana and I are truly blessed to have so many good people watching over us. We love all of you. Now, bed. Buena Note or something like that.

K