Saturday. Another great day of exploring the wonderful city of Rome. We returned to Ancient Rome, this time with the intention of getting inside the Coliseum. First, however, we decided to sleep in to catch up from the busy trip to Assisi. So, at about 10:30 we boarded the metro to the Coliseum. By about 11 we had arrived and we proceeded to get in line for tickets at the Roman Forum. These tickets are 11 euro each and are good for the Coliseum, the Forum, and the Palatine Hill. However, as we were in line, we were accosted by a tour guide who offered to give us a tour of all three and get us inside for 20 euro each. This sounded like a good deal and we had heard that these private tours were usually pretty good. So, we decided to go for it, which turned out to be an excellent decision.

The tour began in the Coliseum. Our tour guide was decent, but not amazing. She was a great storyteller but didn’t get into the history as much as I would have liked. This wasn’t too bothersome though because it was amazing just to be inside the Coliseum. It is hard to believe that something so big could have been built over 2000 years ago. It’s hard for me to admit, but it is definitely cooler than our Los Angeles Coliseum, but not by much. We decided that the Trojans should adopt some of the practices from the original Coliseum, such as Pete Carroll riding out of the tunnel in a chariot or maybe even on the back of a Lion :) Anyways, the tour lasted about 45 minutes and then we were given about 2 hours to explore on our own and grab some lunch. We got a little pizza from a small shop and stopped at the market for some fruit and then headed back to the meeting point.

For the second portion of the tour we were given a new tour guide. This one was much much better and actually was the best one we’ve had yet on this trip. She was a woman from Australia that was pretty funny and definitely knew her stuff. We walked to the Palatine Hill, which was the location of the palaces of the Caesars of Rome dating back to the first, Caesar Augustus. Each successive emperor added on to the palaces until one, I think Domitian, decided he wanted to knock them all out and build a huge palace of his own. The ruins on the hill are almost completely of his palace. The place is huge. And it was all adorned with many different kinds of rare marble from around the world. Apparently, the sign of power was actually to have marble of colors other than white, because white was very common. The Caesars actually used one time of marble, found in Egypt, which is the most expensive material in the world. One cubic inch is worth 20,000. And they had it adorning their walls.

From here we walked down the hill a little to overlook the Roman Forum. This is ruins of the center of activity of ancient Rome, dating back as far as the founder of Rome, Romulus, whose hut still stands nearby. The ruins were definitely an impressive site to see. There was a lot more history that she discussed that was very interesting, but I don’t really have time to get into all the details. The tour actually ended here, but she gave us some suggestions of where to continue. We headed to the Augustus House, which is the only remaining portion of Caesar Augustus original palace on Palatine Hill. They only allow ten people in at a time, so we had to wait about 45 minutes in line to get in. Our tour guide told us it was worth it, and this turned out to be about the only thing she was wrong about. After the long wait, the rooms were pretty unimpressive, but considering their age I still respect their historical value. The colorful frescoes on the walls were quite impressive and are apparently the oldest known frescoes still in existence. Anyways, it wasn’t quite what we expected. On a side note, we did learn a little history about our word for palace. Most people haven’t heard of the Palatine Hill, but it turns out that it is the source of this word. Romans needed a new word to describe the mansions of Caesar and coined the word Palazzo, after the Palatine Hill. This has then become palace in English. I thought this was pretty cool to see how the word developed. After this we wandered through the Roman Forum, and then headed back to the Palazzo Venezia which we had visited previously. It was again impressive and we heard it described fairly aptly as the Wedding Cake building. Check back on my pictures to see what I mean. By this time it was about five and we were pretty exhausted, so we walked back to the metro and headed home.

For dinner, Jeff made us a delicious meal of rigatoni pasta with meat sauce. It was a very good meal and to top it off Mike and Kara made Tiramisu. This was quite an accomplishment because we didn’t have egg beaters. They had to mix by hand until the proper consistency is achieved, which took close to twenty minutes. We rocked out to some Beat It by Michael Jackson to assist the process. The rest of the night was spent relaxing and talking to my parents and Kristin. It had been awhile since I had talked to both of them, so it was a nice treat to cap off the day. And then it was early to bed to prepare for the intense day I had planned for Sunday!