Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, Colosseum

Rome, Italy - Day 2
Sunday, June 22

That morning (Monday) we went to see the Colosseum. On the way we stopped at quite a famous Gelato place whose name escapes me now. Given that there were 34 flavors, you can imagine our joy and drool.

We then developed an understanding for the toga’s use in Rome as we trudged through the excruciating 100 degree, incredibly humid heat at the Roman Forum, the center of Roman government and religious activity, Palatine Hill, the site at which the emperor’s palaces once stood, and the Colosseum, which needs no introduction. OCD fueled our desire to listen to every historic point at the Roman Forum and Palatine hill.

The Colosseum was the first historic site at which I chose not to get an available audio tour, and I still regret it since those are actually quite instructive. An exhibit of various adornments of the Colosseum covered the second floor. We walked around the periphery of the center field, a twenty feet deep stone labyrinth that, back in the day of the empire, was covered with a wooden floor dotted with trap doors through which lions, trees, and gladiators themselves could be added to an ensuing fight/execution.

My Garmin GPS, affectionately named “jeeps”, navigated us through small residential streets and alleyways, far out of the reaches of the peddlers hawking goods to tourists, allowing us to see Rome in a way we hadn’t been able to see Paris or Barcelona. Jeeps guided us to the Pantheon, a former major Pagan temple that was then converted into a Catholic church.

The Pantheon’s interior dome is an architectural wonder. It has an oculus, a hole in the center. You probably know that arches are deceptively hard to construct, because of the fact that the entire weight of the structure rests on a critical point of the top. A dome, which can be seen as a number of arches rotated around a central point, puts even more structural emphasis on this center point. This critical point is, however, exactly where there is an oculus in the Pantheon. The way the Romans accomplished this feat was by using concrete (they had that back then in a more rudimentary form) of varying densities. The structure gets less and less dense as you go from the outside of the circle to the inside, thereby eliminating the need for a solid central point on which to rest.

After the Pantheon, we walked over to the Piazza di Spagna, home to the famous Spanish steps on which young adults used to sit in the 18^th and 19^th century in the hopes of being picked by the passing by artists as models. At the top of the Piazza, we encountered a traffic jam, which we soon found out was caused by the filming of “Angels and Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code.” I asked a portly man with a beard, two traits which I presumed to be indicative of power in the film industry, whether they needed extras, but he, misinterpreting what I said as a request to be cast in the movie, shot back, “You’re going to have to go through a talent agency for that.” They were filming a car chase scene, and given the narrow width of the road, we figured that the protective rock ledge at the side would be included in the shot. We went and sat on the shot through about 5 or 6 takes. We think we saw the actors who we think are Tom Hanks’ and Ayelet Zurers’ doubles.

Afterward we walked through a giant park that sat the north of the city, a park which also housed a villa, now museum, of an old cardinal. After coming back, we were moved into a different room, one not inhabited/haunted by Ostello.