The Roman Forum and the Colosseum

Saturday we were all up bright and early for the trip to the Roman Forum and Colosseum (paid for by the University, yay!) We all took the tram there together before getting our guided tour from Andrew. 

First of course we took tourist photos. 

I got photo-bombed by my flatmates, it was great. 

It was extremely hot of course which made it hard to stay alert, but I did learn some cool things. We first went to the Roman Forum which was huge. One of my favorite places was the Arch of Trajan. My photo probably doesn't do it justice, but it's huge and very cool. In fact the entire site is pretty breathtaking. It was originally just marshy unusable ground until it was worked and artificially raised, if you think about how big an area it was and how high they filled it, the amount of manpower and effort that went into making the ground usable is breathtaking. 

Another very cool place was the Temple of Saturn, there isn't much left, but it's huge. One of the decorative pediments had fallen off and it gives a good idea of scale. Also it is very pretty. 

Arches are cool.

The most interesting thing about the whole site for me was this temple, which was turned into a medieval church. During the Medieval Ages there was a movement to get rid of the temples to Christianize everything, so they attempted to pull down the pillars but it was so well built that they couldn't. You can actually see the rope marks biting into the tops of the pillars where they struggled to pull it down before giving up and building their church around it. Super cool. 

We then wandered off up the hill and saw some pretty cool ruins (and flowers!) there. The view was very cool. 
















The arches evoked the feeling of age in a way that I can't explain in words. The sunlight angled through them and dust motes swirled drowsily through the air. Olive groves and green green grass with the offer of shade lay to the side of the ruins. If you just ignored the babble of tourists it had an almost peaceful feel to it. To me, it just had this brilliant atmosphere.

By this point we were all very hot and tired so we went and bought sandwiches at a supermarket before heading over to the Colosseum.

There were lots of Italian people dressed as Roman soldiers wandering around trying to sell you photos with them. Some of them looked really tacky (there was one guy smoking as he stood there which slightly ruined the image, another centurion was in fact a woman) some of them did actually look quite cool though. The Colosseum was actually the place where we got bombarded the most by street sellers (usually yelling 'waterwaterwater' every time someone walked past).

The Colosseum was really awesome, I probably enjoyed it more than the Roman Forum in fact. I just found it absolutely awe-inspiring. It's sheer size was insane. We could also use our tickets from the Roman Forum to get into the Colosseum so free entrance once again!

 I didn't bother spending the 70 odd Euro to actually go below down into the Colosseum. The view from above was cool enough. Shameless tourist photos also occurred once more.






















By this point it was late afternoon and I was feeling rather tired out, so we took the tram to Piazza Navona for some Gelato (coconut is extremely nice as it turns out!) My ice-cream had a hat. It was awesome.

One of my favourite things about Rome is the water fountains. Dotted all along the roads fresh clean and icy cold water splashes out onto the street, people often fill their waterbottles from it (yes it's drinkable!) splash their face or even half shower in them. We decided try and cool off by dunking our heads under the stream of water. It was cold. Then we headed home. 

We then decided to all go back out to the restaurant we had frequented for drinks the night before and ordered pizza and a bottle of red. It was a very good day indeed.