Roman Holiday, Part 5: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

For our first Tourist Adventure, we headed over to the Colosseum.

You can’t really go to Rome and not go to the Colosseum. That would be like going to Paris and avoiding the Eiffel Tower, or London and skipping Big Ben, or Philadelphia and not having a real cheesesteak. It’s pretty much the emblem of the city, and to be honest it’s worth the visit.

We decided to walk from the apartment since it was a nice day for it – grey and a bit on the cool side, but comfortable and the rain held off. It didn’t actually rain while we were in Rome even though it was supposed to do so for the first couple of days. The walk was enjoyable and ran through a couple of pleasant neighborhoods that looked like they would be interesting places to live, full of stores and apartment buildings and leafy tree-lined roads. One of the most wonderful things about Rome was that it was a walkable city – you actually could get to places on foot. Americans aren’t used to that, and I think we need to return to that ideal. It wasn’t far – maybe 25 minutes or so – but it has to be said that this seemed a lot closer on the way out than it did on the way back after a full day of walking around. We tended to take the bus after that, though we walked around a great deal once we got off.

It's a strange thing to be walking along the streets in Rome because you tend to come upon major historical sites pretty much everywhere. Not too far from the Colosseum we ran into what looked like grassy park. It was roughly oval shaped and the end closest us was fenced off since it had some ruins in it.

We later discovered that this was the Circus Maximus, which was one of the largest stadiums ever built. They’d hold chariot races there and it could seat a hundred and fifty thousand people. Like most things that old it has changed dramatically over the years – the original racing track is about six meters below the current surface now, apparently – but it still is fascinating. They have concerts there now.

A couple of days later we found ourselves coming up on it from the other end, which gives a different perspective.

The ruins on the Palatine Hill loom over the Circus Maximus, and we found ourselves staring at them a couple of times over the course of the week – usually on the way from somewhere to somewhere else.

We never did manage to visit them – in theory they were the third part of our combined ticket to the Colosseum and the Forum and we could have gotten to them from the side facing away from the Circus Maximus where the Forum is located, but by the time we actually got to where we might have gone over there they’d closed the place down for the day. I have no idea how people can squeeze in all three sites in a single day, which is what the ticket requires. We didn’t even really get through the first two. So we contented ourselves with the exterior views, and continued on with our walk.

The first thing you come to when you approach the Colosseum from our direction are the soldiers. The Italian military is a minor but constant presence on the streets of Rome – at each point there are usually two soldiers in camo and a vehicle, though there were more at the Colosseum, and they have some fairly impressive hardware rather openly displayed as a notice that there shall be No Stupid Shit around here. Andi told us that there had been difficulties some years ago and ever since the army was on patrol, which seems to have calmed things down. Or at any rate things calmed down and since correlation and causality tend to get mixed up in people’s minds everyone just assumed that the one led to the other and the army has stayed ever since. They’re polite – we asked one of the soldiers a Tourist Question as we were heading into the Colosseum’s general vicinity and he helpfully told us what we needed to know – but they’re serious and businesslike and not to be messed with, which is what you want out of soldiers I suppose.

No, we took no photos of them. That, I suspect, would fall into one of the minor categories of Stupid Shit and would be frowned upon.

The second thing you come to as you approach the Colosseum is the Arch of Constantine. There are a lot of arches in Rome – you find them in the strangest of places, often just there in the middle of neighborhoods – but this one is notable as being both huge and next to the Colosseum, a fact that tends to add significance to pretty much everything that can be so described. You can’t really get right up to it because of the fence, but it’s big enough that stepping back a bit actually helps the view.

This photo was taken from inside the Colosseum, so you get a better perspective on it.

We stopped there on our way into and out of the Colosseum and just sort of took it all in. We hadn’t gotten used to seeing such things everywhere we turned at that point, and it was impressive. They’re all still impressive even when you do get used to them, to be honest, but the scale of this one tended to stick with me.

You need tickets to get into the Colosseum, and Kim had taken care of that before we even set foot on the plane. This turned out to be a good move, as the line for tickets was fairly long and immobile while we just cruised on in. Other good moves we made were a) coming in March, which is considered the depths of winter in Rome as near as I can tell and which certainly made the tourist density a lot more manageable than coming in, say, June, and b) having the correct masks. You need FFP2 masks – the paper surgical masks and your nitwit hillbilly cousin’s stupid neck garter won’t cut it in Italy and you will find yourself on the outside looking in if you do that. We’d come a long way. We were going to be inside. We had the right masks.

And we got there at the right time. Even during what passes for the off season in March, there are still a lot of people at the Colosseum. Our tickets said we got in at 11am so we were there slightly before then but after having checked our vaccine status they let us in anyway. We had plenty of space to walk around, though as the day wore on that space dwindled considerably.

It’s an impressive building.

The closer shot was taken at ground level with the Colosseum, and you get a pretty good sense of the scale of the thing. The more distanced photo was from an overpass about a hundred meters away. You have to climb up a steep path to get to the road in that picture – the Colosseum sits at the bottom of a hill that way – and this naturally funnels you through a welter of people trying to sell you selfie sticks and charging stations. Those sellers are pretty much everywhere in the touristy areas of Rome and they’re irritatingly persistent – they’ll ask you three or four times before moving on and then, if you’re still standing there, they’ll circle back and ask again just in case you’ve changed your mind. Mostly, though, you just sort of stand there and gawp at the Colosseum because it’s Just That Fabulous.

This picture was taken from the Forum, basically across the street from the Colosseum, and the thing I love about it is that you get a sense of just how embedded this World Heritage Site is within the local neighborhood. It’s just part of the city.

Once you get into the Colosseum you find yourself in a vast, long hallway full of arches, cluttered with artifacts, and dotted here and there with exhibits for you to learn more about the history of the place. They’re well done exhibits, really – the Colosseum has a long history that didn’t stop when the Roman Empire collapsed. It was part of the medieval and Renaissance life of Rome as well, which is something I sort of knew but never really thought about.

Everywhere you look there are tour groups shuffling along and then stopping at predetermined points so the guides can get their spiels out. Sometimes they all wear the same jacket or shirt, and usually they’ll have earbuds so the guides can talk without having to shout. All of the guides have poles with random flags attached to them so they don’t lose their wards in the crowd. Sometimes we’d follow one of them to hear what they had to say, though most of the time they were either speaking some language other than English or they were simply roadblocks to further exploration on our own.

Eventually, though, you have to get out of the hallways and into the open area that is the main feature of the Colosseum. It’s a big, open bowl of a stadium, and you can walk around the first level that you come in on (which is one level up from the ground) or you can walk around the next level up, which requires you to climb up a seriously steep set of stairs.

The view is marvelous.

The wow factor is a bit, well, not diminished exactly, but certainly shaded, when you consider what went on in this space over the centuries that it was used. There’s a lot of blood soaked into that ground.

What’s also fascinating is that there used to be a level below the surface where all the action happened. The flooring is long gone, but you can still see the interior working spaces.

A lot of those little spaces were elevators where animals or people could rise up out of the lower level and into view of the crowds. There were entire menageries of animals below there. There were spaces for the gladiators and other humans as well. The weight of it all can bear you down, even as a casual observer.

On the other hand, there were some funny bits.

One of the things that fascinated me was the brickwork. I learned over the course of our time in Rome that most ancient Roman buildings were mostly made of thin bricks – maybe an inch high by four inches wide by ten inches long or so – that were eventually covered in stone for the outer look of the thing. Most of that outer stone – marble, usually – has long since disappeared into other buildings as the ruins were repurposed as quarries over the centuries, but the brick still remains.

The good people who run the Colosseum these days are very protective of this brick, as you would imagine, and throughout the building you see signs like this one.

These are regarded as quaint by both locals and tourists, to judge by the bricks themselves.

Some of those scratchings go back to the 1800s or earlier, and some of them weren’t there when we woke up that morning, so nice try on the signage, I suppose.

We spent about three hours at the Colosseum, carefully parsing our way through it. It’s kind of mesmerizing that way. Eventually we got hungry and went exploring for lunch – a rousing success, as will be described in a future post – before returning to the area to check out the Forum.

It took us a couple of tries to find the entrance, since we were coming from a slightly different direction than before and there are a lot of signs that say “Forum” on them. Our first try was actually a bit of a false start as we wandered up a long hill that led us to a church of some kind where a large group of teenagers was being given a tour of the outside, but eventually we found the real entrance. In retrospect this probably shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was, but we got to see the church part so that has to count for something.

The real entrance looked like this.

We waited in line with a fairly good sized crowd that inched slowly forward until we got close to the gate, whereupon one of the guards got tired of everyone trying to funnel through one line when there were at least two perfectly serviceable lines we could funnel through and began shouting and gesticulating for us to form two lines, which eventually people sort of did. We were distracted by one of Rome’s feral cats for a time, but at some point we presented ourselves to the security check, proved our vaccination status and masks, sent my camera through the checker, and then found ourselves in the Forum.

The Forum isn’t a thing. It’s a sprawling collection of things all jumbled together into a large open space in the heart of Rome. It’s got buildings, arches, towers, statues, and more, and you just sort of wander around in it.

There’s a lot to see, both in terms of structures and in terms of the artwork inside of them.

This one is the Temple of Romulus, which still has the original bronze doors (which were open when we first got there, but which eventually were shut when the Forum closed down for the day). There are a lot of exhibits inside, and an astonishing amount of art.

The thing about it, though, is that it just keeps going. Every time you round a corner or even look off in a different direction there’s some other astonishing thing to see, and you can get right up to them for the most part. There are so many of these ruins lying around that they even let you sit on them. It’s stone, what harm are you going to do to it?

 

One of my favorite bits was the arch at the far end of the Forum, which was not easy to get to at all as there was construction fencing around most of it. But eventually we circled around the back of it and got a decent look at it. I thought it was marvelous.

One of the odder things that they’ve preserved here – and in other places, such as around the Arch of Constantine – is the original Roman paving for the roads, which I suspect has lost some of the sand or gravel that smoothed it out. At least I hope so, because trying to navigate over those stones was an ankle-busting experience. I was very glad that I had strong ankles.

 

We stayed until they shut the place down at 4:30. We never did get to the Palatine, though we did see this side of it.

Afterward we walked back to the apartment, stopping along the way to hit our pasticceria and rest up, before eventually heading out for dinner.