Piles of stone, once great,
Lie scattered around the old
Town, cleft by metros.
Well. Here is the short blog post: we saw a big park and the Trevi Fountain and the Roman forum and the Colisseum today and ate some delicious food. Here is the caution: we learned a crapload, and I'm about to write down all of it that I can remember.
The park was a nice place to start the day. We wandered around and stopped in a café playing acoustic arrangements of songs like "Smells Like Teen Spirit." We had cannoli (a super delicious pastry which is filled with cream) and espresso strong enough to nearly knock us off our feet. We looked over all of our old maps and dreamed about the things we'd done and those that we had yet to do.
From the park, we attempted to head towards the old town. Roma's streets are less-than-navigable, but the driving here is amazing. I recall being told that drivers in Roma are insane, and Evan and I concluded long ago that Italy would be the place where we would die in a horrible traffic accident, but it turns out that because they all drive like maniacs, they all know that every other driver and pedestrian will behave predictably like a maniac, so each person is actually a very safe driver. It's awesome, and we actually feel alright about walking blindly across traffic in busy roads.
On our way to the old town, we stopped for gelato in a tiny shop, and then we spent about half an hour trying to find some way to get a bill smaller than a 50 because the man couldn't make change for us. That was... frustrating.
A lot of informational boards pepper the streets in Roma, describing everything from the history of its churches to the architects of its monuments to movies filmed in its streets. We happened across a board that talked about "La Dolce Vita," which was filmed partially in Rome. The board described a scene that took place in the Trevi fountain, which was just down the street, wherein the leading actress lept in in her evening gown and was followed by the leading actor in his tuxedo. "Legend has it," the board read, "that the Swedish woman had no trouble filming the scene, but that the man had to wear a scuba diving suit under his tuxedo." We didn't jump in. We decided that it probably was frowned-upon.
Further on, we found the Plaza Venezia, which is the beginning of the part we intended to spend the day visiting. Immediately across from us was a large monument with winged victories on top, columns stretching sideways for an eternity, and the Italian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in its base. We walked up to read about it; it was built after the wars as a symbol of national unity, and a carved woman with symbolic accessories represented each region of Italia. We learned with some sadness that a few old palaces had to be destroyed in order to make room for such a large monument in such a populous place, but... maybe it was worth it. The Italians (or at least the author of that learning board) seemed to think so.
There was an old church just next to it, with stairs leading up to a plaza where it was not permitted to sit down. Curious. We went to the grocery store to pick up some lunch, which turned out to be delicious sandwiches of grilled eggplant marinated in olive oil and spicy pepper with herbed goat cheese. We bought a 300g bag of chocolate cookies with stars on them to tide us over until we were done learning and could eat dinner.
Behind all this was the old jail, which we couldn't find a board about, and behind that was the Roman forum. It was 12€ each for the ticket into the Forum and the Colosseum, and it was totally worth it. I apologise if I don't really put things in absolute chronological order, but I'm just writing them as I remember them. Here we go:
People have lived in Roma for a very long time. People have acted like people for a very long time. Some boards explained the story of the AEmilia family and a basilica they built to show off how powerful they were. There were freizes on the walls to explain all the most important events in Roman history. One important event is the founding, of course. Long ago a pair of twin brothers was abandoned at the foot of the Palatine (a hill in Roma) and nursed to adulthood by a wolf. Their names were Romulus and Remus, and they both wanted to found a city. They amassed their respective armies, and eventually Romulus killed his brother and founded his city, Rome.
Another important story depicted was the rape of the Sabine women. As Rome's power grew, they had to find more and more ways to expand it, and many of their ideas, as you may know, involved conquest. They attacked one particular village, killed all the men, and carried off all the maiden women (one sign carefully noted that no married women were carried off) in order to procreate and expand Rome.
Eventually, of course, as the empire drew to a close, the AEmilia family's power dwindled, and they allowed their basilica to fall into disrepair.
Also around the forum were temples dedicated to various gods and godesses. One of the more impressive that still had pieces standing was the temple to Jupiter. Just a few columns jutted into the sky, a strange focal point on a background of modernish apartment buildings.
Up the hill to the Palatine. One unfortunate thing about the visit was that an audioguide was available, which meant that the curators of the site were fairly negligent with their signage. We saw a lot of old things that had no information about them. At the top of the Palatine, there was an antiquarium (I'm not certain what the difference is between that and a museum, but they're called antiquaria here) which had a lot of history posted on it, and the signage at the top was generally somewhat better than at the bottom.
The Palatine was for the most part reserved for the rich and powerful of Rome. At one point, the crazed emperor Nero burnt down a rather large swath of everything so that he could build a nice palace up there for himself (at the same time, he comissioned thousands of workers to dig a giant lake on the site that would become the Colisseum and asked for a statue 70 metres high of himself to be carved from stone). Anyhow, the Palatine was the site of some pretty nice things, and the antiquarium explained that during excavations of basements, today's archaeologists (there are, in fact, still people working on excavating the forum) had found evidence of settlement in the area 300 or so years before even what we consider the ancient Romans. It explained that something which was apparently common practise in this age was to bury dead infants around one's yard to mark it as one's own, with the bodies of older children and adults being buried in a cemetery outside of town. That seems... strange to us.
The antiquarium also discussed the generally lavish nature of the homes built on the hill, and it briefly discussed the bathhouse nearby which had not only the potential for running water (more on that in the bit about the Colisseum), but also the capacity to heat and cool both water and air for the pleasure of its patrons. Next door to the baths were the remnants of a rather nice stadium. Evan and I speculated as to why the Romans would need a second, smaller stadium in sight of the Colisseum, but no board told us, sadly.
Down the hill towards the Colisseum, we found some signs indicating an ancient vineyard. Cooler, though, were the signs just beyond a large fence which talked about some current excavations. That part of the hill was rather structurally unstable, and some work had been begun to try to shore up any potential for landslides. During that work, archaeologists discovered a mechanism that they believe was used for moving pavement. It was actually a machine that could rotate large blocks of pavement (if you've been to SF, think of the thing that turns the trolleys around). Yeah. The Romans had that.
It took us around 2 or 3 hours to see the Forum. It was awesome.
Across the street from the forum is the Colisseum. We were immediately glad that we had already purchased our tickets, because, as you may be able to guess, the Colisseum is the thing to see in Roma. Anyway, we got to waltz past the ticket line and head in.
The Colisseum was around 50 meters high on all sides when it was constructed, and it was able to seat about 50,000 people. For many years in the middle ages, people ransacked it for stone. Eventually, Pope Benedict XIV put the kibosh on that. What a reasonable guy. Anyway, it was constructed by the emperors in the Flavian dynasty, so it is more correctly called the Flavian Amphitheatre. Evan and I joked that we could be super-pretentious and insist upon calling it that. I doubt we will.
There were about 7 million thousand learning boards in the Colisseum. We spent another couple hours there. We learned about all the interesting little things that had been found during excavations and in the drains: sewing needles of various qualities indicated that the gladiator fights crossed genders and classes; ancient Roman graffiti showed up today's graffiti - they carved scenes of gladiator fights into stone in their spare time; burn marks on the walls and smaller animal bones in the crowd area imply that people would make a day of the whole thing, even going so far as cooking food beforehand and reheating it in their seats in the amphitheatre. Drinking was permitted, of course, but to maintain order tokens were issued which allowed only one ration of wine per person.
We learned a lot of things about the Colisseum itself, too. The floor, a large sunken pit now filled with stone warehouse rooms, was once just an empty, watertight hole. It was possible to stage naval battles in the floor. There was a wooden upper floor which the Romans had designed for quick and easy removal and replacement, so gladiator fights were held in the sand on this floor, and it could be removed to bring out ships. Ships. And the engineering prowess of the ROmans went beyond that: they had running water coming from free public fountains up in the crowd stands. Not only did they have enough fresh water that they could flood the entire floor of their damn Colisseum, but they gave it free to their public. And they managed to rig it so that they could pressurise fountains 50 meters up. That is serious business.
Even the construction of the Colisseum was a huge feat. One board indicated that 158,658 cubic metres of earth were removed for the building of the thing. One wonders what feats mankind might have accomplished if the Church hadn't overwritten the knowledge of the ancient people.
The gladiators, as many people learn, were comprised of both slaves from conquered and exotic lands and of free men trying to make money. One board informed us that the average duration of a gladiator's career was 12 fights, with the minimum being about 3 and the maximum being over a hundred. Gladiators were usually owned/sponsored by the rich, and gladiator battles were generally called by either the emperor himself or a politician seeking some good publicity. In the beginnings of the Roman empire, the gladiators were not killed, as this was actually too expensive a thing for the up-and-coming empire. Towards the end, though, the famous thumbs-down was the way of things.
Today, the Colisseum is actually still used for one thing: the Pope's annual Good Friday walkthrough. It seems almost cruel that the Church has taken over the last symbol of the empire that worked so hard to keep its power against the tide of Christianity. Clearly, the Christians won, but...
Whew. That's all I can remember for now. I'll have Evan look over it sometime and probably add some things that he remembers that I forgot to add in here.
Our learning completed, we wandered back to the grocery store to pump some food into our starvation-mode bodies. It's hard to go 5-6 hours without food when one is used to consuming 5-6,000 calories a day. We had more sandwiches, this time with cheese and delicious Italian prosciutto from Parma, and then we stopped off for more gelatto from a shop that had about 60 different flavours (we chose Gran Torino, Pistachio, Spumoni, and... umm... one other one). We headed tiredly back to the hostel, where we sleepily watched the movie "9." Now, it's dreamland time...