Ruins (Becky)

We headed out to see the Roman Fora and Coliseum on our last day in Rome. We started at the Fora, where the line was shorter, and then were completely confused by poor signage. The tours listed outside the gates weren’t available inside, the prices were different, and our 6 euro audioguide turned out to only work in the Fora and not the Coliseum. This all annoyed me to a high degree, but after some whining Jeremy convinced me to try to enjoy it anyway. It was pretty cool to see the ruins up close, but really hard to imagine what things looked like over a thousand years ago. And our audioguide was always frustrating me by making passing reference to historical events I knew nothing about. I couldn’t definitively tell you what anything was, but it was all impressively large, old, and half-destroyed.

About half way through the fora walk, I realized that our tickets (which allowed entry into both the Fora and the Coliseum) were no longer in my pocket. I panicked, emptied out my bag and my pockets, but found nothing. So, unwilling to buy another ticket, I sent Jeremy on to finish the tour while I walked backwards through it searching the ground for our tickets. I didn’t find them, but did manage to look awesome as I picked up trash all along the path, inspected it, and threw it back down in disappointment. Luckily, when we both arrived back at the ticket booth, our ticket agent remembered us and gave us new “free child” tickets to the coliseum, telling us “Now you are under 18 years!” Disaster averted.

We headed to the Coliseum next. It wasn’t quite as large or impressive as we had envisioned – it felt a bit like walking into the stadium for an American football game. The original wooden floor was long gone and had been only partially restored, so we could see down to the under-stage tunnels that apparently were used for transporting gladiators and animals and setting up stages .

After the Coliseum tour, we headed out to get some dinner, deciding on a small deli up the street for some delicious lasagna. And then it was already time to catch our overnight train up to Venice.