Stepping Into Ancient Roma

In my last blog we were having a relaxed breakfast in the early morning at a Café in Bologna.  Time however got away from us a bit, we had to quickly grab our bags and start running to the train station. But it was okay we made it on time and jumped on our train from Bologna to Roma at 12:07 pm. Two hours later we made it to Roma, I will never forget that as we were rolling into the city and we saw the big stone walls that protected the city from invaders. It was constructed between 271 AD and 275 AD and is known as the Aurelian wall.

Before I go any further, I’m just going to clarify why I’m using the name Roma instead of Rome it’s because in Italy they call it Roma and I did not even know that Rome was an English name we gave to the city. I like to acknowledge the name the locals use it, there for I’m calling it Roma.

Once we arrived in this wonderful city and embarked at its main train station, something odd happened that honestly has not happened anywhere else on our whole trip. We had to walk to the other side of this massive train station just to find a toilet. Once we got there the drama didn’t stop, I got the to the female bathroom however the machine to pay was not working only the cash machine was working. This was resulting in people holding hands and going through the turn style toilet door. Some people were sneaking their way through the exit gates and there were no staff members helping resolve this situation. Desperate times require desperate measures, so I had no issue with what people were doing it was they needed to do to get into the only bathroom for miles.

Remaining on the topic of bathrooms, this was not the last time Roma showed us how subpar their public toilets (I will expand more on this later). I was surprised as this is one of the key essentials when having lots of people around. Roma was by far the busiest and most touristed place we had been to this whole world trip. However, enough about our not-so-great first experience in Roma there is a lot more this city showed us other than its toilets. This city is intertwined with ancient history, amazing buildings, culture, art and religion around every corner.

Once leaving the train station we had a quick lunch in the city before heading to one of the outer suburbs of Roma where our accommodation was located. I could truly feel my eyes roll back in my head because I was so tired after a longe and tiring day of traveling. We arrived and basically just fell straight asleep into our beds before another early morning.

The reason we woke up early was to get to the colosseum, unfortunate we forgot to book and we were standing in front of the colosseum at 8:30 am in the morning. As you can tell, we don’t tend to book things way in advance opting for a more Australian flying by the seat of our pants. However, not to worry there was still a spot at 4:15 pm in the afternoon. So, we just rearranged our day moved the activities we were going to do in the afternoon to the morning, as is mostly the case with this style of free flowing traveling it turned out beautifully. We ended up cramming a lot into this day.

The first thing we did was walking past the old chariot racing field called Circus Maximus, it goes as far back as the 6th Century BCE in Roma this is in the early days of this ancient city. We ended up watching some videos online to help us imagen what this would have looked like in ancient times.

It’s quite interesting walking around a city that is so old and seeing ruins all over the city from different historical time periods. Like Berlin, this city has many historical layers all coexisting next to each other in our modern times. We got to see a monument to Victor Emmanuel II the first king of a unified Italy, on March 17, 1861. The monument was built between 1885 and 1935 it was a grand symbol for the newly formed nation and embodies national pride as well as housing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier who died in World War I. We also saw a statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius who reigned from 161 CE until his death in 180 CE. This statue was located in the Piazza del Campidoglio and near the monument to Victor Emmanuel II.

After all that excitement we were getting quite hungry, so we stopped for some lunch which was lasagna for me and my brother.  After lunch we walked through Piazza Navona it was a very beautiful place with lots of magnificent fountains although there were a lot of people in the square, so we only had a quick look.

Doing some research for this blog I learned that Piazza Navona was built on the Stadium of Domitian which was a stadium completed in 86 AD to host athletic competitions which included running, discus, fistfights and much more. It could contain up to 30,000 spectators. Something interesting is that the Colosseum was completed in 80 and the Stadium of Domitian started construction in the same year.

Piazza Navona mirrors the shape of ancient arena. People can still go and see the ruins that lie about 4.5 meters below the current street level.

Roma is one of the places where you could spend a good month there learning about all the different monuments, statues and ruins. Our Europe trip was more a taste of the variety that exists in the European cities we visited.

One thing that I like doing once I start writing these blogs is to do some more research on the places I’ve seen and may not have known while visiting. It somehow makes me even more interested because I continue my learning months after visiting the place.

Once we had a quick look at the Piazza Navona, we continued our walk past the Pantheon meaning “for all the gods” in Greek Pantheion. The pantheon was originally built as a pagan temple dedicated to all the gods of ancient Rome. For example, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Minerva, and many others.

Later that day we got onto the Spanish Steps. They are called the Spanish Steps because they lead up from the Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Square), which has housed the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See (Vatican). This is where things got a bit interesting. After we had climbed up the 135 steps on an extremely hot day, there where these people at the top near the Trinità dei Monti church handing out these quote “free” roses and the basically shoved them into your hands then after a couple of seconds ask you to pay for them. Um that’s not how we roll, so we shoved the roses back into their hands and kept walking.

After the Spanish steps and an afternoon snack, we walked over a magnificent bridge to the Castel Sant Angelo. Alonge the bridge we got our first good look at the Vaticano. We recognised the Castel Sant Angelo from the movie angels and demons where the bad guy hangs out. It’s quite in interesting building from the outside as it is round. We continued our walk past the Fountains of the Palace of Justice to get to the train station where we got a brief intercity train to the colosseum. Once there I really needed to go to the toilet, so I went to the train station and let me tell you it was one of the worst toilets I’ve just about ever seen, and I live in Australia where they don’t have the cleanest toilets. It was one where you have to pay with coins and then it did this “self-cleaning cycle” before you could go in, that whole inside was wet but not in a good way. It was one of the toilets where you don’t touch anything hold up you pant legs, so they don’t touch the floor.

In the late afternoon we explored the ancient ruins as well as the colosseum. We first did the colosseum where it felt like we were going through airport security just to get in I understand why they need to do it I just think they could have done it better. Once we were in it was very nice and I liked how they had put up one fourth of the arena to help people imagine what it was like. We were also able to see the trap doors and things which would have been underneath the arena.

We only spent a little bit of time in the colosseum because it was getting late and we also wanted to see the ancient ruins before they closed. The ruins were amazing very impressive to walk around them, but lots of walking in one day.

After this long day we got back on the train and had some dinner before going to bed with throbbing legs but an active mind thinking about all the things we had seen that day.

The next blog is where we walk around the Vaticano and where we’ll be having our best dinner in Italy yet.

More about this extraordinary city in the next blog…...