We were at the Coliseum! Or is it Colosseum? Whatever it is, I got to Zagreb from Rome yesterday by way of Venice and wanted to post a quick update saying that I’m back in the blogging game with a vengeance! Or at least back with a small whimper.
Rome was awesome. The Pantheon is still amazing, there’s an ancient pyramid somewhere south of the city, Pompei is a totally-doable day trip, although you have to be prepared because it’s effing huge, and the Sistine Chapel really does have a lot of paint in it. Renting a scooter was awesome although driving in Rome was frustrating because I’d swear I knew where I was going and *boom* we were across town in a giant park about to get on the freeway. Ah well.
More details after the break.
The first few days were walking days – Coliseum, Palatine hill and the Forums are all on the same 12euro ticket. We did them first. I’d like to have had the chance to go back to the Forums, at least, to look at them at the end, having gathered better ideas about what Rome was like at the height of this era, but there’s just too much to do.
We walked all the way to Vatican City the next day, which I estimated at 4 miles. No problem, except I was still tired from walking (and from not sleeping in) the day before. The Vatican Museums were cool – we ran through them at first to get to the Sistine Chapel (which is, of course, at the very end), then went *back* through the museums to see stuff stolen from Egypt, ancient Greece and other places, as well as Roman work, like the cool-ass map room, and original and copy-of-greek sculptures. Good stuff. Too much to do in a day, much like the Louvre, but definitely more human-scale than the Louvre, which is outsized in a very intimidating way. St. Peter’s was huge enough, though (the second largest church on earth), with a nave long enough to land a plane and to hold the throngs of people who pass into it every day. St. Peter’s statue’s foot was pretty well rubbed away, so I helped out a little, and the Pieta might be even further from the glass than it used to be. Still spectacular. Took a cab home, though, because we were beat.
This post is getting entirely too long, so I’ll wrap it up for now, but promise to continue when time and internet access permits. Probably from Dresden – the Germans have to have good internet, right? Here in Croatia it’s shit.
Anyway, happy Wednesday from 9 hours ahead of my long-lost West Coast home!
The following pictures are all absurdly out of order because the transfer program sucks and there’s still somehow no way to simply order by filename, for the love of fucking christ. I just can’t reorder 210 pictures right now and not go fully insane.
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