traveling 4

First off, I apologise for all the mistakes I have made and will make in the blogs to come. I'm not taking a lot of care with proofreading, just want to get them done so I don't get impossibly behind, and also for posting a photo twice in the last blog

Our final day in Rome - the warm sunny weather was back and we were off to wander about the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill. Our tickets for the Colosseum tour were also our tickets for this area, no extra cost and no queuing, she said, and this time -  there was no queue! YAY the queues are so so long so it is fantastic to be able to walk past them, so we walked past the very long line of people who had to buy tickets, to the gate, showed our tickets and were in. 

What a place! mostly ruins, however they are rather amazing ruins. From the Forum we continued on looking around the Palatine Hill site which covers a huge area and just got more and more astounding the further we went. It truly was overwhelming . The sheer scale of everything. The Romans didn't demolish buildings to  build new ones they just built on top of things so at times we were looking down  two levels and there was another level above us. We also knew that there were buildings under our feet and that some years ago hundreds of years ago people lived and died in these buildings.

A huge amount of excavations have been done but such is the scale of this place that we knew that there is a vast  amount still to be uncovered. This was truly mind blowing stuff to me. 

 Fortunately, we'd had the foresight to take some food with us and we thoroughly enjoyed eating our lunch sitting on a piece of 'old' marble, with the sun on our backs. 

We were here for 7 hours. We just kept finding more and more to look at, to wonder about and to be amazed by. We absolutely loved it, beats looking at 'old stuff' in museums, in my opinion. For some reason I could be absorbed by bits of marble here but wouldn't give two hoots about it in a museum. 

Finally it was time to leave. In Rome, these kind of places close 1 hour before sunset which was about 6.30 pm when we were there, and it was almost this time when we left. 

Here's some photos:

the entrance to the Forum

we were past this by the time the crowds got in

 The door is the original bronze metal door, the last left of three. The other 2 disappeared

We wanted to tell the workers that they had so much to do they didn't have time to sit down

 

this was the entrance to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins

Barry wondered why he didn't learn Latin, how useful would that have been here!

onnthe way to the Patatine Hill we walked along Nero's road

Barry was so overcome with the history he had to have a lie down

 From the side of the hill looking over ancient Rome to modern Rome

on the hill

 looking across the valley to more ruins that we didn't go to

that's enough. Looking back at the photos I'm once again struck by the enormity of the place, the ancient history, not only of what we could see but also knowing that there is so much more still to be uncovered. 

The Forum and Palatine Hill are next to the Colosseum, all only about 10 minutes from the apartment, so after leaving the 'hill' we just wandered around our neighbourhood, had gelato, some beer, looked at more ancient stuff which is just everywhere until it was time to find some dinner. This time just across the road from our apartment and then home to pack. 

We had to be gone by 8 am , down the road to the  metro to the station to get the train to Naples.

So this was our last day in Rome. We loved Rome, and think that it is a very beautiful city, very clean and easy to get around on foot or using the metro. To us it has the feeling that the people who live here are very proud of their place. There were no huge advertising hoardings and no graffiti, except along the outside of the trains, no litter - at least that's our impression.

We had fun, ate good food, drank good wine and beer - "some of which cost us a fortune and some of which cost us bugger all," from Barry.

next stop Naples!