Day 3 - The Forum, Palantine Hill and the Colosseum

We, again, met up with Judy to guide us through our next adventure here in Italy - The Roman ruins at Palantine Hill and the Colosseum. The ruins consist of various layers of civilization that have been uncovered to show the power and the majesty of the Romans in their day. Judy explained to us that, at one point, there was a hill that was as tall as an ancient column that still stood near the beginning of the ruins. To look up at the height of the column and imagine that there was a hill there that was excavated by the hands of individual men, shovelful by shovelful was, incomprehensible. Once again, here was something that else that can only be experienced by being here, looking around and truly seeing the grand scale of the antiquities. There is no way that a picture, video or Google Earth would do it justice.

As we walked along, and looked down at the ruins, Judy explained to us that the reason we were looking down was because of all the layers upon layers of civilization that built upon the ruins of the previous one. Most of the ruins were 20 feet down at the bottom of these huge archaeological digs. Judy took us into the main Palantine Hill area where you walked down this hill and could actually walk around amidst the ruins at the very bottom of the "civilization layer". I actually felt like I was on a movie set. Everywhere I turned were columns, stairs, building remnants, hearths, cisterns, etc. All built by the hands of humans 2 millenia ago! As we were walking along, Judy was complete in her descriptions of what it would have been like when each layer was the contemporary layer. Grand marble palaces with fountains, huge arenas where sports of the day would take place. Homes and gardens of the most powerful and advanced civilization to ever inhabit this planet.

Virtually every single antiquity in this entire city is built of brick. To look up at the massive scale of these ruins and imagine that every one of those bricks was made by hand by some slave was beyond my capability to fathom. I suppose it would be equivalent to Donald Trump conquering all of Mexico and make the Mexicans build his palaces by hand or die. That's the way it was, though. Judy explained to us that, originally, all the brick that we were seeing was most likely covered in beautiful, shined marble. As a matter of fact, she informed us that one of the emperors insisted that the marble be shined to such a mirror-finish that he could see his own reflection in it and also the reflection of his enemies!

Jess and Nok left us a little early as Jess had a meeting that he had to make so they left us with Judy to finish up the tour and, afterwards, we decided to hoof it back to the hotel rather than take a taxi. It was about 5pm and we had a dinner reservation at 6:30 so we needed to hustle a bit. It was quite warm, the streets were packed and we were tired and thirsty. Finally made it back to the hotel, showered and off we went to meet the Hills, once again, for a wonderful dinner.

Dinner, this time, was in the Jewish Quarter and, once again, we had an amazing feast! Afterwards, we strolled back through the illuminated streets to our hotel, taking pictures along the way and just truly enjoying ourselves. The Hill's are wonderfully gracious people and it's been a pleasure to finally spend time with them in their hometown.

Just a little side note here....I've actually been typing this "offline" off and on during our 4th day here because the Internet has SUCKED so very bad! I'm charging my phone right now with the hopes that I can connect to cellular data and upload a few pics. The pics I took in St. Peter's Basilica were truly amazing.