Wow Rome really is the "Eternal City" it's sooo old. It kept blowing my mind. I would start to forget about it, and then we would come across something like this:
They find ruins like this all the time, and if they're big enough they just cordon it off. Oh you know, a 1000 yr old-plus ruin? Yeah there's another couple down the street. And those are just the inconsequential ones that aren't labeled. When you actually go to the tourist sites?? Those are even cooler. Take the Forum-the sort of downtown for Romans, where all the important buildings (law courts, temples, etc) stood. Our word "forum" (meaning a place for debate and discussion) comes from the Roman Forum. The wall at the end is where all sorts of people would give speeches to the people and debate philosophy, law-you name it. What was really cool for me was realizing that when Peter and Paul preached in Rome, this is the most likely place they would have stood. Walking among the ruins realizing that they walked the same road that I was standing on-that was really cool. And it put into perspective how old these ruins are. They are from before and during the time of Christ.
For example: the arch below. It was built by Jewish slaves when the Romans took over Judea. All of the other takeovers were easy for Rome. As long as you agreed to pay taxes and worship the Roman gods and emperor, they would leave you to continue life as you had before they took over. But for the Jews, accepting pagan gods was not going to happen and they rebelled. So the emperor took slaves and made them build this arch celebrating their defeat. And it still stands today. (Arches like this were the inspiration for Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He was quite the imitator of the Romans and actually did a pretty good job).
Here are some more pictures of the Forum. I really had to use my imagination to try to guess how it looked when these buildings were new. It must have been quite the impressive place-these buildings were huge. It's amazing that they had such good engineering way back then.
After the Forum, we headed out to the Colosseum across the street. It's huge. To give you some perspective, in its heyday it could seat more than 60,000 people. That's bigger than the Duck Stadium! They killed an exotic animal every 5 minutes, every day-a lot of them were actually almost extinct by the time the Roman Empire fell. It requires a lot of imagination to look at it, because what remains is just the skeleton, almost all of the seats are gone, and the area floor is gone too. It's pretty incredible to stand in the middle of it.
Next up: the Pantheon. The original one, that all of the neo-classical architecture is modeled on. IT WAS AWESOME. So cool. You come around the corner of a modern building and BAM:
It's really cool because it's the only complete Roman building still standing. The only reason it was saved is because the Catholic Church took it over and turned it into a church, so it's the longest continuously used building (ever?). There used to be stairs leading up to it but the ground has risen 25 ft since it was built, so the stairs are gone. And the inside is even cooler. The dome is the largest in Rome (the pope wanted St Peter's to beat it but Michelangelo designed it only a meter smaller just to spite him haha. He was quite the rebel.) The hole in the dome is open to the elements but the floor was designed with little holes and sloping toward the walls so that the rainwater drains naturally.
After all that sightseeing in the heat (even though it was technically only 75, the humidity makes it feel like 90, I've never been so sticky in my life) we grabbed some gelato at the most famous gelateria in Rome. They weren't kidding, it was amazing (somehow they manage to capture the exact essence of whatever the flavor is, if you get peach it tastes exactly like a perfectly ripe peach). I got chestnut and blackberry mmmmm.
We also saw a Bernini fountain--it represents the four major rivers of the world: the Nile for Africa, the Ganges for Asia, Danube for Europe and Plate for the Americas (according to wiki haha). I wonder if it was the inspiration for the Fontaine Bartholdi in the main square in Lyon (done by the same guy that did the Statue of Liberty).
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| Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers |
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| Bartholdi's fountain of the four rivers of France |
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