Romà

Rome is a beautiful, old, dirty city with ruins everwhere in the city center. The subways are always very busy as they only have two lines running. Avoiding rush hour is a good idea.

We arrived in Rome around 9am after a night train from Munich. Gone are the convenient English speaking tourist information booths we'd become acustomed to in Germany and Austria. This makes for a frustrating time as we try to figure out where and how to get on the subway and local train to get to the Bed and Breakfast we were staying at.

Abacus (name of my current employer by the way) Rome BnB was our final destination. Its a long story, but let me just leave it at we were thankful to find this place. Here's a photo of the outside of the estate.



This BnB looked fantastic from their website. We were not dissappointed when we arrived, except maybe that the live in maid's english was very, very limited. We were taken out back and given refreshments before being shown down to our room. The house is absolutely huge, it has three stories and a small elevator. It is cylindrical in shape with a very nice plant and rock garden on the main floor that can be seen from the 1st floor (in the US we call it the 2nd floor). The BnB rooms are in the basement and have their own entrance.

So we got changed and dropped off our stuff before heading back into Rome for some proper site seeing. The Colosseum and The Forum were top on our list and that's where we started. We ended up taking a tour from a local company that had rep's gathering people outside the building for a tour. We both enjoyed the tour, it gave us some historical information about the Colosseum from a charismatic and fun speaker. The tour consisted of two parts the Colosseum and the Roman Forum.

More pictures for you:




Here's another picture of us around the Roman Forum.



One thing we learned from the guide (A Brit getting his PHD in roman history, he was very passionate and it was humorous to hear him refer to some of the past Roman emporers as 'brilliant') was that during they heyday of the Roman Empire that vehicles carrying goods were not allowed on the streets in the city during the day. Thus they had to move things at night quitely. Apparently the wagon wheels were covered with animal hide to dull the noise of their metal rims coming in contact with the stone roads. He also stated that light was provided at night by reflecting firelight off of walls that were coated with olive oil. Here's a picture of a ruin that has a hole in the wall where a fire was supposedly lit for this purpose.