Here’s a good way to spend your Sunday:
Laze around in the morning, collect breakfast on the tray from the hotel kitchen, laze around some more reading the guide to memorable walks in Rome, sleep for an hour to catch up on jetlag because you’ve been waking up bolt upright at 5.30am (which is actually really annoying). Then plan a walk down to the colosseum.
Under the Termini there is a supermarket which is surprisingly cheap – we got 2 peaches, 2 oranges, and 2 sandwich rolls for lunch, for (drum roll) 6.50. More expensive than Australia but not the gouge we’d been led to expect. From the supermarket we headed down the hill in very warm sunshine, stopping at a bar just above the steps down to the colosseum for an espresso (1 euro…grrr, who do they think they are? It should be 85 cents.)
We sat on the grass out front of Il Colosseo and ate the peaches, carefully scrutinising the admission line for signs of either growth or decay, while simultaneously laughing at the people stopping to get their photo taken with three men ‘dressed’ as Roman Centurions.
We were going to take a guided tour of Il Colosseo for 10 euros (in addition to the 11 euro entry fee), because the tour is
a. guided, and
b. allows you to skip the line
but while we deciding it would be a good idea the remaining tours filled up so we resolved to join the line and see if it moved. In any case we could always eat our oranges and look through the guidebook in the line. Turns out they weren’t oranges but grapefruits, but we ate them them anyway. If you avoid the pith that removes most of the bitterness (sort of).
Anyway the line was moving OK and it only took half an hour to get inside, where we discovered that Il Colosseo is of course every bit as spectacular as you would think it would be. I could jabber on and on about the features and the general grandness, but instead I’ll just say that everyone should see the colosseum in their lifetime.
Due to an error of judgement on my part (namely thinking that the emperor Nero’s palace ‘Domus Aureus’ would be worth a quick look) we didn’t get into the Palatine Hill before 6.15pm and lost part two of our two part ticket. Ooops…
So then we hiked back up the Via Cavour toward the Santa Maria Maggiore (all roads lead to Rome but most of the roads in Rome lead to Santa Maria Maggiore), found a pizzeria and had the usual. Having left our handbag-size water bottle lying around empty somewhere we went into the supermarket below whatever building is across the road from the Maggiore and found that
a. water is cheap
b. beer is cheap (600ml bottle of Stella Artois…. drum roll… 1.35 euro.)
1.35 euro is about $2.40, which was too good to resist. By buying lunch from the market this morning we had a bit of breathing space and when you encounter a large bottle of Stella for $2.40 the choice is clear. As I write this at 8.50pm, the sun has been down for about 20 minutes and the beer is cooling in the hotel fridge.
Perfetto.
Greg
Browse Timeline
- « A Roma
- » Il Vaticano