Day 7 - ruinous

A visit to anywhere in the ancient world is just not legitimate without scrambling over fallen rocks and trying to image entire buildings from looking at one slice of a column.  I couldn't look anyone in the eye without having done so here, in Rome, the heart of one of the greatest civilizations ever known to man.

Our first day of cloud too, so looking at bits of stone took a more sombre tone, but we were ready for it, up early to get there before the hordes.  We started by walking up the Capitoline hill and looking down on the Forum and across to the Palatine hill before making our way down and inside. 

I tried to imagine what it was like to see Julius Caesar as he departed from home for his assasination (and could not keep from hearing his wife Cassandra, speaking in a Bornx accent that Wayne and Schuster put in her mouth for all time: "I told him, Julie, don't go!  But would he listen?  It's like talking to a wall!") , or troops returning from foreign conquests and parading down the Sacred Way (the "Broadway" of the Republic) in victory, or the vestal virgins moving to and from their shifts to keep the flame alight, maybe high fiving each other as they passed,  bleary-eyed from their previous day of being wined and dined as special guests at the Colosseum. 

Whatever the mental picture, these remnants and foundations were once the absolute centre of Roman life.  It's quite amazing there's anything left here at all when you think that the place became vacated not long after the Republic collapsed under its own excesses a coiple of millenia ago, then used as a quarry for pieces of stone incorporated into other buildings and roads, the place itself as a cow pasture for centuries.

The Palatine Hill, where twins Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves before fighting to found the city (Romulus won, thus the name "Rome")  was lovely and green, a garden at the end filled with citrus fruits glowing like globes of sunlight on such a grey day.  The Hippodrome, really a kind of open stadium likely for foot races (too small for chariots) lies below, surrounded by walls and trees, with Circus Maximus far below and outside the walls.  The Circus is enormous, capable of holding 250,000 spectators, about a quarter of the entire population of the city at the time, and 12 chariots at once.  How exciting it must have been to watch Ben-Hur hurtle his horses around the track! Well, ok Ben-Hur is a fictional charioteer, but there must have been some champion that kind of looked a bit like Charlton Heston and that caught the local's imagination.  Every audience needs its hero.

We ducked into the 'Museo Palatino', which had a semblance of warmth, although I'm sure that a museum of stone floors, stone walls, and filled with stones is ducked into for the opposite reason most the the year.  It is filled with pieces that have been excavated from the area, staturay and frescoes and even pieces form the Bronze Age. 

It's likely that if we had a large hot coffee in our hands and maybe a snack of the chocolate (me) and cheese (Martin) variety we could have spent hours more wandering around this place evocative of a long gone civilization, but the bodily attractions of this current civilization sent out their siren call and we were powerless to resist.