Rome day two - Sept 23

Did the open-top double deck sightseeing bus again (ticket lasted 24 hours).

Then we toured the Colosseum and Roman Forum. We had purchased a Roma 3-day pass, which allows unlimited transportation, entry into the first two museums free, with discounts after, and lets you bypass lines at big sites like the Colosseum.
The Colosseum is massive! It was completed in 80AD, and seated 50,000. There was a wooden floor over the center part, with like 40 elevators beneath to bring men and animals to the surface. In the inaugural games, which lasted 100 days, 9,000 wild animals were killed. The exits were called the vomitorium, we didn't find out why. I guess what I realized was that with both the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus just across the Palatine Hill, movies like Ben Hur and Gladiator, which I previously thought were surely exaggerated, are in fact pretty accurate.

The forum is very extensive, as you can tell by the photos. There are many temples, arches, courts, and monuments, with a central stone path, the sacred way going up the middle. They had a god for everything, even a god of fertilizer they could pray to, and were very superstitious. In posts-Roman Empire years, an earthquake partially destroyed some of the buildings, but mainly later Rome inhabitants stripped the buildings of exterior marble and stone to build their own buildings. Thankfully, they usually left a few columns standing. We were told that only a quarter of ancient Rome has been excavated. If a building was impressive enough, like the Pantheon (Temple of all the gods), it got turned into a Catholic church as is during the Christian era, with the replacement of Roman gods with statues of Saints and Popes.

It was kind of cool to think we were walking on the exact same stones where the Emperors had walked. Most of the buildings were made from brick, with cement or marble faces. You can see pock marks in the brick walls where the faces was held on. Some of the columns are brick with cement exterior, but some are solid stone, not sure how they possibly could have made these by hand.

We had internet access in the apartment, and watched a couple youtube episodes of a BBC docudrama called "Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire" (click for link, you have to find all six parts of the episode, but it's worth it). The episode on Constantine in about 300AD was particularly interesting on how the empire suddenly switched from the ancient Roman religion to Christianity. We also thought it was interesting how some of the old Roman ideas seemed to be kind of adopted into the new church.

After the forum, we went back home to rest a bit, then went out in the evening to visit the Pantheon, only a couple blocks away, and on to the Trevi Fountain, but it was very crowded. We decided that there were some things we should be seeing early in the morning.The dome is the amazing structure on the Pantheon. It is a one-pour concrete structure, 20 feet thick at the base, and 7.5 feet thick at the top, using progressively lighter stone like pumice in the concrete as you go higher up. There's an 8-meter diameter hole in the top for light, so when it rains the floor has drains. Pretty good for 126AD.

The last photo is of the Victor Emmanuel Monument, honoring the first King of a unified Italy, completed in 1935, destroying a large area of Roman Forum ruins. I'm not sure why the later Italians couldn't just build their stuff somewhere else.

Rome day one - Sept 22

On our first full day in Rome, we went over to the nearby Piazza Campo di Fiori morning market.

We caught a hop-on-hop-off bus and toured the whole city to get oriented, which took us by all of the major sites with an audio tour. Rome traffic can get really nasty, and driving very creative. I think it's faster to walk many times. The major Rome attractions, from the Colosseum to the Vatican, are within about a 2-mile diameter circle, and our apartment was near the center.

We walked over to the Capitol area, about 10 minutes walk, to look over the Roman Forum.

We did an MP3 tour of the Jewish Ghetto area, which included the Theatre of Marcellus, completed in 13BC, which the Colosseum was patterned after. The Rome Jewish community had been through a lot over the ages, and even today the synagogue has a lot of police and barriers around it all the time.

The mouth of truth in the entrance to a small church, from Roman Holiday, which we had watched on our laptop on the flight from London. The line to get in was too long, so I took a photo through the bars. Anyone know how to photoshop?

In the evening, we walked to Piazza Navano, which had many street musicians, some good and some not so, and bought a small watercolor painting which reminds us of the views from the apartment. We saw a lot of couples walking hand in hand, and stopping to kiss, and we did likewise. One of our favorite stops is a small piazza with a turtle fountain very close to the apartment.

Views from our apartment in Rome - Sept 21

Fantastic views from our apartment. St Peter's dome is off in the distance, and there are two other smaller cathedrals close by.Several times during the day the bells from this church ring.

This is the top of the Pantheon across our neighbors deck.

We look down on this narrow pedestrian street, and romantic accordion music from a street restaurant wafts up at night. One of our favorite things to do is to just sit in the apartment and enjoy the views and sounds of Rome. We found the apartment on FRBO.com. The Area Sacra Roman ruins of four temples under excavation are just across the street. There's a stray cat foundation at the edge of the ruins, so they are covered with cats.

We take a very old elevator (like in Charade) to the sixth floor, then walk up one flight.

We had a little adventure on the way from the airport. We thought we'd try to fit in with the locals and ride the train and tram into the city instead of arranging a driver or getting a taxi from the airport. Which went fine until we got off the train at Trastevere station. As soon as we had gone up the stairs, a man approached us indicating we had some foreign substance on our packpack and pants. Then, another man offered some tissues, which I took and began wiping off our small backpack without removing it from Debbies back. In another minute, still another man indicated we had even more of the foreign substance on our pants, and offered to help with a bottle of water. He even had some on his pants, and was demonstrating how to get it off. The substance smelled like mustard and mayonnaise, so I wasn't too worried, but perplexed as to how it got all over us. Something clicked in my mind about then, they seemed a little too helpful, I raised my voice and said "NO!", and put my hands out to indicate that we weren't interested in any more help. I told Debbie I thought they were trying to rob us. It might have helped that there were two policemen not far away outside talking to a man about his motorscooter. We hung around the policemen for a while, just to make sure.

We didn't know this, but the woman who arranged our apartment rental via email had a baby the day before, over 10 lb difficult delivery, so she wasn't answering her cell phone. We found the 26 Arenula apartment building and kept attempting to call her, thinking that maybe the whole apartment rental, $200 deposit, and required 770 euros in my pocket, might be part of a scan as well. Half expecting to get mugged any time, we kept calling her. After a couple hours, we got her, and she explained about the baby, and that her husband would meet us in an hour. It all turned out fine, the apartment is on the top (seventh) floor, and has absolutely fantastic views out over the old center of Rome. We can see the tops of many cathedrals and monuments right from our windows, even the bathroom.

Warwick Castle - Sept 19th

Warwick is one of the more commercialized castles, but it is the classic castle. It has been a significant castle through many centuries.
I guess a young Winston Churchill used to hob knob with the Warwicks. They were looking for volunteers, so I got to help wind up the large trebuchet, that's me in the hamster cage, which hucked a 16 kilo stone about 300 yards. They said that this is the largest authentic wooden trebuchet in existence.


For utube video, click here. I think maybe they have fewer lawyers in England than we do. Looking through utube, there are larger ones made from modern materials. I especially like this one about a rich English guy chucking flaming pianos and cars. His final words in the video are "It's not enough, is it?"

Loch Ness, Inverness, and Invercharron Highland Games - Sept 17,18

Driving across the Scottish Highlands
Urqhart Castle on Loch Ness - this castle was one of the ones which was blown up at one time, but it has a very pretty setting on Loch Ness, and lots of Loch Ness Monster tourists. We didn't pay much attention to the monster stuff.

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Though it's pretty far north (same latitude as Juneau Alaska), we had planned to be near the small town of Invercharron on the day of the last highland games of the summer. It was a lot of fun watching the dancing, piping, running, and strength competitions, like the caber toss and hammer throw. One thing we noticed was that most all of the dancers, pipers, and athletes all took it very seriously, you can tell by their faces.

Scottish Highlands - Sept 16

This is a typical Scottish Highlands road, and Kilchurn Castle, which used to belong to the McGregor Clan, according to the McGregor Clan website. The only way to get to the castle is by boat, and it wasn't running that day. The McGregor history includes the famous "outlaw", Rob Roy McGregor. It's a pretty wild history. see this link
This is Eilean Donan Castle, blown up and then restored in the 1930's.

To listen to Griogal Cridhe (Beloved Gregor) mp3 music, click here

Like the Orcop Holley story, and the roman history to come in later posts, I tend to take all history, including the stories of the Scotland McGregors, as possible or maybe probable history. The people who win the wars get to write the history of the war, and I'm not always sure they don't embellish the facts.

Edinburgh, Doune, and Falkirk - Sept 15

Edinburgh has very interesting topology, with the castle up on a hill. We had castle burn-out, and didn't go in. Debbie recovered by shopping for tartan scarfs. My grandmother told us that we were related to the Edinburgh Stevenson's (the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson, and his father and brothers who build most of the early Scotland lighthouses), but I'm not sure we can establish a direct link. My middle name is Stevenson with a "v", but my Mom's extensive genealogical research includes many Stephenson's (with a "ph"), only two Stevenson's, who are suspiciously married to women named Stephenson. So I'm not sure. The lines probably merge at some point anyway, so what does it really matter? I haven't found any direct link to the steam engine Stephenson's either. I suppose we'd all like to think we're related to someone of historical significance, maybe it makes us think we have more potential. But then again, any person who really accomplished something didn't do it because they were related to someone famous. More often I think the most successful people come out of obscurity.

This is Doune castle (in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and the Falkirk Wheel, a sort of giant ferris wheel for canal boats.