Day 7 In Rome: Touring Roman Landmarks

Today was a busy day! First stop was the colesuem. When we were walking up to get in line to buy tickets an American guy asked us if we needed a guided tour, after talking we decided to give them a try (great decision).

So we were in a group of about 10 other English speakers, mainly Aussies and Brits, the tour guide in the colesuem was Italian and had a heavy accent we later found out that she was just filling in. The colosuem is a very cool building it could hold about 50k people which is as many as most sold out major league baseball games. It was built in about 7 years from the slaves that were brought back to Rome after the Jewish revolt in Jersaluem a few decades after Christ died. The only thing they forgot was bathrooms makes you wonder what all those people did. Some cool things we found out were that the events were all free. Caesar (taxpayers) picked up the tab and food was normally provided, especially if they were killing animals. After the fall of Rome and after a earthquake took down one part of the structure it was used as a quarry were the marble was collected and used in other projects all over Rome.

After the tour we were told we could go on a free tour of Palatine Hill as well so of course we did. We got an amazing Aussie guide this time. Palatine Hill is where the Cesears built their houses and it overlooked the forums. It is a pretty tall hill but it used to be taller with two peaks but after those Jewish slaves got finished with the colosuem they came up and leveled the hill to make a flat top hill that bigger palaces could be built. Actually the were called "big houses" in Latin until this occurred then the houses became so big they were called palaces because of the palatine hill. It is where the word palace comes from in almost every language. But I digress... These palaces were huge now most if the walls are gone but you can see the outlines and we are talking 2-3 football fields. The floors and walls were totally marble a lot of it a certain kind called egyptian pophery (which is purple) they exhausted every quarry that had this marble and no more quarries have produced it in 2000 years it is worth $25,000 per sq inch today. After the buildings were destroyed the Vatican reclaimed a lot of it to build St Peters now 80% of the world's Egyptian pophery is within the Vatican walls (we saw some in the Louvre in Paris).

Next we went down through the forums. Cool thing is most of it got covered over and so when they started excavating in the 1800s alot of it was still intacted including the orginal roman roads.

We really liked the tour guide and their company was doing a night tour of alot of the other sites around the city so we paid our 20 euro/ person and took off again. I will just hit the highlights... Trevi Fountain is cool it is fed from a natural spring by a 1500 yr old aqueduct, no pumps, all gravity fed. Pretty cool. You throw a coin in the fountain and it said you are guaranteed another trip to the Eternal City the Vatican (charity) gets the money, about 6000 euro/day in tourist months. The fountain was commissioned by a pope who's family owned (and apparently still does) the square. Sorry if I am making a lot of anti Vatican statements but they did some pretty selfish stuff back in the day, more on that later.

The next cool think was the Pantheon. It was a very cool building from an engineer’s point of view. It is a huge circular building with a dome roof and a hole in the middle of the roof. The way they built the roof was to build the walls up and fill it with sand and build the forms and pour the concrete slowly with lighter and lighter concretes. Then they had a huge building full of sand... But the designer Marcus Agrippa was smart... as they were filling it with sand he dropped 1000 gold coins then when they were done he told the people about the coins and that they could only take one bag of sand per family at a time... The sand was emptied in 3 days.

When the Pantheon became a church (the first church in Rome) there was a "house of working women" across the street so the pope put a placard across the building saying basically may this evil business never prosper... Now under that sign is a... McDonalds!

Finally we went to Piazza Novona which is like this big oval plaza that used to be a Roman chariot race track. It has a famous fountain representing the 4 great rivers of the world. The funny thing our guide pointed out was that none of the people on the fountain face the church in the center of one side of the plaza and none of the statues on the church face the fountain. That is because the student of the guy making the fountain stole his commission to build the church. So they were building them at the same time and would throw tools and rocks at each other frequently.

Sorry that was long. Great day the tour guide makes things so much more interesting.

M&T