Rome, Italy - Getting lost in The Eternal City

June 12 - 19, 2009
By Brad Taylor

In May 2009, Averyl convinced me that we should go and spend a week in Rome, A.K.A, the Eternal City. Av, having been there once before, loved it and figured I would too. I wasn't too keen on Rome in the beginning but I sure am glad we went.

Without really knowing where we should stay, we found a nice hotel called the Fellini Inn and decided to book it online and hope for the best. It offered a car service to pick us up at the airport so we figured it was okay.

Upon arriving at Leonardo da Vinci airport we were picked up and shuttled back to the Inn in a nice, new Mercedes. Having spent the last nine hours on a plane the luxury of leather seats, leg room and air conditioning was not lost on me.

We arrived at the Fellini Inn to a very friendly and welcoming staff. We got checked into our room and immediately wanted to go for a walk to see what was around.

As it turns out, our hotel was at the top of the "Tourist Walk" which basically runs from the Trevi Fountain all the way down to the Colosseum. We couldn't have asked for a better location. We spent the next three days walking the Tourist Walk taking in the wonderful sights of The Trevi Fountain, The Pantheon, The Forum, The Colosseum and Circus Maximus.

The amazing thing about Rome is there's so much to see and the best way to see it is by simply walking. We spent most of our time getting ourselves lost in the myriad of tiny winding roads then trying to figure out where we were. This led us to discovering the location of Castel Sant'Angelo, Piazza Navona, and Piazza Del Popolo.

On our fourth day in Rome we decided to take a tour of the Colosseum. We walked down, took one look at the ticket line and decided it to forget about it. As we were about to walk away a woman approached us and asked if we were interested skipping the line and taking a tour through her group. Jackpot! We may have paid a little too much but it was worth it to skip the line.

Our tour took us in and around the Colosseum explaining how it was built and why. One of the most interesting points was that admission to the Colosseum for the Gladiator fights and public spectacles was free! The Emperors Vespasian and Titus had built the Colosseum and not charged admission to the general public in order to keep them entertained and to keep them from revolting.

The tour that we bought also gave us admission to the Forum. The Forum was the epicentre of politics, business and worship around 78 BC. The ruins of the "Curia Hostilia" - original Senate House of the Roman Republic, the "Tabularium" - official records office and numerous Temples and Basilicas can still be seen.

While we were in the area of the Colosseum, we decided to take a relatively obscure tour of an ancient Mithras Cult temple which lays beneath the San Clemente Church. In impeccable condition, the temple featured very narrow corridors and barely visible paintings on the walls. This was definitely a site worth seeing.

On the fifth day we took a day trip out of Rome to visit the catacombs on Via Appia Antica. Via Appia Antica is an old cobble stone road that was used to march the Roman armies between Rome and Brindisi in the south.

After a harrowing 3km walk trying to avoid being hit by passing cars, we made it to the entrance of the catacombs of San Sebastiano. These catacombs were the final resting place of some of the earliest Christians in the area.

The catacombs are filled with dark narrow passages with niches carved into the walls where the bodies would have been placed. (Not a great place to be if you suffer from claustrophobia, I almost went running out screaming at one point.) Although the catacombs are fairly well preserved only 3 floors remain intact and open to the public however as the first floor was destroyed.

A tour of The Vatican was something that I really wanted to do while we were in Rome. On the sixth day we were off to do just that. We had booked a tour, online, that was to start at 11am so we woke up at 9:30am and began getting ready to go.

We had walked to Castel Sant'Angelo before and figured that the walk to the Vatican would take us a half hour so by 10:30am we were out the door. By 9:50am we had reached St.Peter's square in front of the Vatican but no tour groups were to be seen.

I ran up to a Carabinieri officer while pointing to our map and he informed me that we had to follow the outer wall for about four blocks to get where our group was to meet. With ten minutes until our tour left without us, we sprinted around the outer wall arriving outside the museum entrance with about ten seconds to spare.

I ran up to the first guide looking type person I could find and shoved our reservation into her face asking if this was her. "Okay, great, we were just about to leave without you" was her reply. We had made it... Soaked with sweat and completely out of breath, we made it.

The Vatican museum is an archaic and confusing place with so many sculptures, paintings and fresco's it makes your head spin. After walking for about an hour and a half of marble busts of some of Rome's most influential people, we arrived in the Raphael rooms. The Raphael rooms are seven connected rooms in the museum, which Raphael painted floor to ceiling, they're absolutely breath taking.

The end of our tour led us into The Sistine Chapel. I had heard about this Chapel, as I'm sure most people have, but what I didn't know is that it's tiny. The Sistine Chapel is only like thirty feet wide by one hundred feel long. Not quite the scale I was imagining. The other thing that struck me about it was that after walking for two hours through the Vatican Museum, you're really arted out. I mean, you just spend two hours looking at some incredible masterpieces, and I just found that I didn't have the proper appreciation for Michelangelo's "The Last Judgement." Not to say that it wasn't impressive but I'd just seen too much already.

From the Sistine Chapel we had free reign to walk about St. Peter's Basilica. Now this is the most impressive piece of architecture I think I've ever seen. It's absolutely massive and the decoration is perfect and Bernini's alter at the end of the Basilica is more impressive than one would imagine.

The Vatican really gave you a sense of being small when you exit the main large doors of the Basilica and enter into St. Peter's square. The feeling is incredible.

The last day of our time in Rome was spent working our way up from the Spanish Steps to Villa Borghese. Villa Borghese is a large park north of the city centre. We spent a lovely afternoon riding around the park in an electric bike type of contraption getting laughed at by the Romans in the park.

After a subway ride to Termini train station we were back at the airport ending our stay in Rome. I would definitely recommend Rome as you could spend weeks there and not see everything that Rome has to offer.

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