It’s hard to say how long we were up yesterday. I guess subtract eight hours from Rome and you have Mountain time, but all I know is I was so tired that if I let my eyes close, they reopened slightly cross eyed. BUT. We fought through it after landing around 7:45AM in the morning and our goal was to make it to 7 PM before crashing completely. That would put us pretty well on Italy time for the rest of the trip.

So: after we got here, got our stuff, got through customs, and arrived at our hotel, we knew we had to get moving or we’d crash right away. There’s plenty to do, so we picked something exciting: ancient Rome. Colosseum, Palatine Hill, and the Forum.

The Colosseum is not something I’ve ever felt attached to per se, not in all my reading about Rome, not in movies, not pictures, etc. But when you see it, it’s different. The sheer magnitude of it combined with the grace and dignity it retains resonate deeply. Which is odd when you think about it, since the Colosseum was huge and it was pretty, but it was not dignified. It was brutal. Maybe the sense of dignity comes all the stuff we impose on it about the feels of an ancient civilization, or maybe it’s because we respect it for surviving, despite it’s complex character.

Regardless, I love this structure, and I love this shot:

We managed to luck out after that — every first Sunday afternoon in Rome, it’s free to get into the Palatine Hill. Normally it’d cost us 24 euros, but today, they just handed us tickets. There is a TON to see there, seriously. Things like the Arch of Titus and Trajan’s Column.

I didn’t take many pictures, as you could end up with hundreds and they won’t do it justice (or be that interesting after a point.) Much of it is behind fences, as it should be, but there are some areas where you can go touch.

I suspect these “touch-allowed” spaces are largely restored areas with little or not original material left, but no matter. There is something transcendent about placing your hand on a wall originally built by a human, just like you, over two millenia ago.

So after spending several hours there, we exited the area and checked the time. It had to be late afternoon!

Nope. 2 PM. Still 6 hours to go.

So, we started walking. We walked to a huge white marble building just down the street.

We walked to get gelato, with the bonus of a sugar rush, and then we saw a sign for the Trevi fountain. Might as well, we said, it’s only 3:15, let’s go! Sadly this was closed and covered in scaffolding and tourists, but it was an interesting walk.

By then it was 5 PM and thank God, we said, now we can eat dinner to kill some time and get a solid meal in ourselves, so we walked back to the hotel and headed towards a nearby restaurant that had been recommended to us. And that’s when we remembered that we’re in Rome and no one in Rome eats dinner at 5 PM. So we went looking for a grocery store that had also been recommended, and couldn’t find it, so we grabbed a pizza and a Peroni from the place next door to the hotel and headed home. And crashed.

I just woke up and I think I slept for about 12 hours. 😛 Woke up around halfway through and crashed again. Still waking up. 😀