Day Three: The Colosseum, The Roman Forum, and the Amazing Borghese Gallery

On my third day in Rome (and Sean's first), we went to the things that Rome is most famous for: The Colosseum and the Roman Forum. This stuff was built around, oh, you know the year 90 AD, which makes it all pretty DARN old! It's amazing to even try to fathom this! The Colosseum was basically a big sports arena. 50,000 people could fit in there at once, and, while there, they would watch gladiators fight either each other or animals. Most of it still exists, and the part that is missing has been incorporated into other famous buildings, such as St. Peter's Basilica. And, the photos:


Sean outside the Colosseum - note: he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt! The weather was great! :)

The inside of the Colosseum... the floor that you can see now is kind of a maze of sorts... animals were kept down here until it was time for them to be raised to the arena. This was all covered with sand back in the day...

Seanny-Boy with a close up of the bottom level

Aw... more of us than the ruins, but cute never-the-less. :)

After the Colosseum, we went to the Roman Forum, which was basically the town center in its time. Laws were made here, there was a market, and temples to the Roman gods were also located here. The remains were just unearthed fairly recently - the 18th or 19th century. Not everything is even excavated yet - there was still work being done. We saw some pictures of what historians think this area must have looked like - it was quite impressive. Have a look:

Roman Temple - this one was still fairly intact, and has actually been used as a Christian church as well

Excavation work being done...

KP with the ruins

After all of this history, we needed a break, so we stopped for pizza! Later in the afternoon, we visited the amazing Borghese Gallery, which had some of the best sculptures I have ever seen. They were so realistic that its hard to believe that they came out of a block of marble! Sorry, folks, no pictures allowed, but I did buy a few books of them. Dinner that night was at one of Stefano's favorite restaurants, and we tried a pasta with "pajata" sauce, which is lamb intestines. :) It was mixed with tube noodles, so it kind of blended in. I didn't tell Sean until the end what we were eating. hehe It was actually quite tasty. We slept hard after a busy day in preparation for our next day... an 8:30 am train ride to Naples and a visit to nearby Pompeii...

More to come...