The historic city of Rome

(The Coliseum really does look like all the pictures.)









Bob and I finally made it to Rome and it was quite a trip.


Thanksgiving is no fun without friends and family to share it with so we took off to Rome for a four day weekend.




Rome is..........old.


We saw a lot of "this is where the ......used to be." In fact, they even sell a book with see-through pages of what the tourist places used to look like and what they look like now. In America we would have had all those old places torn down long ago to make room for Walmart, Meijer or Home Depot. (Can you see my tongue in my cheek?)


I can't say Rome is beautiful but it is interesting. You have to do a lot of imagining to "see" the gladiators in the Coliseum, the speeches in the Pantheon, the races in the forum. But they are there. And awesome. I could have been more impressed if we weren't trying to see everything in two and a half days. It would have taken a week or more to truly see and appreciate all the places and their history. The last day we took a tour bus----you know, the kind with the open upper deck and a recording telling you the history of each site. It was well worth the money but still couldn't get to all the history of Rome.




And....there were fountains everywhere, even built into the sides of buildings in unexpected places. We were walking down a road looking for a street called "Quatro Fontana" wondering how we would know when we got there (street signs are almost non-existent) when I noticed a building with a large, beautiful stone fountain carved right into the corner of the building. Bob was ahead of me and I pointed out the fountain. He lifted his camera to take a photo but.....he was looking in the wrong direction. "No, that other way." He looked up at me and said, "no, There's the fountain." By this time I had caught up with him and could see that each building had an intricate fountain sculpture carved into the corner. What an amazing site. And....we had found our street.






The most beautiful sites were the churches.

Basilichi (plural, I think, for Basilica) and cathedrals have what has to be millions of dollars of statues, artwork and just plain gold. The most beautiful church in the world has to be St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. There is no picture that can adequately represent the beauty there. Even the windows are put in for the best effect in shining light on the beauty. I'm going to have to put a lot of the photos on Flickr because Bob and I took around 250 photos. After filtering down the duplicates and just plain bad photos there will still be a lot.








One place I just had to see was Trevi Fountain. Every movie with Rome as a background mentions or shows Trevi Fountain. It took us all three days but we finally did find it. And it is just as beautiful as they say.

Really big, too.

So big in fact that there is room around it for about ninety-five souvenir and gelato shops. This is our first view of the area of the fountain.

And this is what we all came to see.

Last note: In order not to make this blog too big, (though it's already huge) I'm dividing it into three parts. This is really part one. Another day I'll add part two and then later part three. For a teaser, part two is named (for now) Amazing Art Part three is .....and how we were ripped off by a taxi driver and bought what was probably stolen..............no more or I'll give it away.