Foot sore, hot, tired, and ready to be home, we wanted to make the most of the last day of our honeymoon and the last day in Rome. We got an extra day to flights being rescheduled. We had too many things on our to do list to make it by foot, and we were burnt out of trying to figure out public transportation in cities where we didn’t speak the language.
Our hotel desk clerk had a map of a hop on, hop off tour bus. We had seen them advertised in other cities, and even done one in downtown San Diego with Phil’s parents. The bus had a bunch of stops we hadn’t been to, but some we had, which meant we could spend more time at the places we wanted: The Colosseum and the Forum. Better yet, the forecast warned of rain.
Since we didn’t buy tickets in advance, getting tickets to get into the Colosseum seemed quite sketchy. We were worried about getting ripped off by illegitimate sources. However, we managed to buy tickets with an escort that got us to the front of the line after only a short (less than an hour) wait. However, some of the congestion seemed to be caused by someone who climbed out on the outside of the structure and was threatening to jump:
One of the things that we learned (at least what we were told) is that many of the pockmarks in the stone on the outside of the structure was due to vandalism in the Renaissance period, where builders chiseled into the stone to extract the iron rods that held blocks together.
Despite how large the Colosseum is, we didn’t spend a whole lot of time inside. The crowds inside were a bit annoying, the structure didn’t offer a lot of shade or respite from the heat, and honestly the view doesn’t change a lot as you walk around it. We did not pay for the extra tours inside to go down to the lower floors.
The Forum was almost incomprehensible. The complex seems vast and inhuman now, but we found it harder to understand how time changed the landscape over the years. Buildings were constructed, dismantled, rebuilt, built over, or reused for so many centuries and millennia.
One of my favorite structures was a temple with purple columns – the Temple of Romulus. The columns were carved from a rock called porphyry – which means purple in Latin – and I believe came from Egypt.
Everywhere we looked we found more ancient structures, resurrected from the earth where they had been hidden, protected, or obscured.
One spot had been memorialized as the spot where Julius Cesar’s was brought after his death.
The rest of the day, we spent riding around on the bus, hiding from the rain and resting our tired legs.
And of course – one last plate of pasta, a spaghetti carbonara.
The rest of the trip was only marked by exhaustion. We landed in LAX late at night – around 10 pm. We were supposed to catch a Flyaway bus from LAX to Union Station, but after an hour coming back through customs, we missed the bus. We ended up getting an Uber back to San Diego, and bless his heart, he took us. We were terrified the whole way, dozing off to sleep only to be woken up by a jolt from the driver, but we made it home, in the end.