2000 years of history in one location

(Originally written offline; continued from previous entry)

After the Borghese, we let Dad go back to the hotel while Mom, Dave and I visited ancient Rome, starting with the Colosseum.





In size and construction, the Colosseum is strikingly similar to a modern football stadium. It has the same ellipsoidal design, and held a crowd of about 70,000. It even had different sections for different strata of society, and a system of awnings to protect those in the seats from sun and rain. It's amazing how little has changed in almost 2,000 years. About the only thing it's missing is a big ancient parking lot.

Much of the Colosseum was damaged in a number of natural disasters, including an earthquake, or taken away by scavengers; what remains is only a skeleton. The seats don't exist anymore, only the walls that once supported them; and the wooden floor of the arena (covered by sand when the stadium was in use) has of course disappeared, exposing the system of tunnels and chambers beneath.



Even more so than most things in Italy, it's hard to give a sense of the scale of the building, but here are a few more pictures to give you an idea:







We took a guided tour, given by a woman who talked a lot in rapid English with a marked Italian accent. I can't say that I learned much from the tour other than the rough history of the building: constructed in the AD 70s, used for a few hundred years, then abandoned for another millenium. Still, I enjoyed visiting the Colosseum just to see the thing for myself and to marvel in the majesty of its size and age:



(A significant part of this whole trip for me is that it's the first time I've ever seen man-made structures that are more than about 400 years old.)

Afterwards, we took an (unguided) stroll through the remains of the Roman Forum, an "open-air museum" containing the ruins of several ancient buildings.



We were a little too tired at this point to try to grasp much more history, so we just strolled around and gaped at the sights.







It's amazing to look at a little pile of bricks or a few lone columns and to think that what you can see is only a tenth or a twentieth of what once existed, millenia ago.











Of course, I kept up my watch for scenes of natural beauty:





In the evening we all went to a nearby Irish pub for dinner. I wanted to see how the Italians did a burger and fries. Not bad, it turns out. Then we went back to the hotel and, as we did more often than not, conked out. Hey, we needed to rest in order to survive the following day: the Vatican.