Italy 2011 - Day 6 (Rome)

Ah Rome... I like this place. The people are friendly the food is wonderful. Its all around neat. Normally i would show pictures in the order we did our day but I gotta start with the last one of the day. We ended the day by hitting a grocery store and then walking back to the apartment with our friends Jamie and Dawn to make dinner. The lights were on the moon was near full and the streets were buzzing with people yet calm. So on our walk across the river we took this lovely picture. So now back to the not so calm stuff. We started the day out taking the Metro to the Colosseum. They have a tour that is suppose to take you to the top and lower sections of the colosseum, unfortunately since I'm not the smartest when it comes to verifying that we are on the right tour we missed that one but we did have a great lady with lots of tidbits show us around the place. It sat approx. 50K people, dang

thats a lot. The gladiator games were considered a gift to the people from the government for the peoples entertainment. Many times there were animals from all over the world fighting the gladiators. She also mentioned they would release prisoners with animals and watch them try to survive. Luckily Romans are a little nicer now days. After that we tried out some more italian food, darn we have to eat to have energy. Anyway today i tried a spinach and cheese panini. And well it was yummy but when it came it was a hamburger bun with cooked spinach and melted Mozzarella. I guess panini's are not the grilled things like we have at home. Im fine with that it was good. After lunch off to the Roman Forum, which i guess was the main part of the city back then and where the emperor lived. This place is right across from the colosseum. What is interesting to me about it how far down everything is. So you climb this hill but then you are looking down into a

lot of the ruins. And apparently due to fires and earthquakes (yikes) the city was destroyed many times. All I can figure is infill, level it out and build on top. Because it seemed like the architecture changed as they dug farther down. Anyway from here it was a coin toss walk or metro. Metro won.. so we headed to the spanish steps. But this metro station apparently has 6 exits. Top of the hill, bottom of the hill (steps) and somewhere in the middle. Well my wonderful directions dumped us at the top of the hill. After much starring at a map near the subway we figured out how we may get to the spanish steps. We had a few wrong turns but then found our way thru a beautiful park and a wonderful view of all of Rome. Very cool. Anyway we walked our way down the spanish steps. From their we headed back via a shopping area we wanted to hit. Did a little browsing around and I found an italian suit that fits great. So I bought it, guess I'm done shopping for me on this trip. Well our day ended with Jamie making us a pasta with home made sause, some wine, salad and good company. Off to florence tomorrow.