Yesterday we decided we needed a complete and total day of rest, a true Sabbath where you do absolutely nothing at all. It was what the doctor ordered. We awoke today feeling less tired and zombiesque and more like ourselves, though we didn’t feel totally back to normal, either.

This morning we took the train back into Rome. We went to the Colosseum first, a noticeably shorter subway ride than the Vatican. As you exit the “Colosseum” station, you are literally across the famous structure. We weren’t expecting it to be so close and we gaped in awe at it. Of course, we were immediately pegged as tourists and recruited to join a tour. The Colosseum, Palantine, and Roman Forums are all side by side and a guided tour of all three was only $17.00 USD each. They even gave us headsets so we could hear the tour guide. It was cheaper than getting the audio guide to all three places, so we joined the tour.

The Colosseum tour was excellent. The guide did a good job. From the outside, the Colosseum looks exactly like the photos you have all seen. The theater was a Greek invention (semicircle around a stage) but the amphitheater (sticking two theaters together) was a Roman invention. The Colosseum held 50,000 70,000 people (depending on which source you site), but, believe it or not, was not the largest stadium built in their day. No one made another amphitheater as large as the Colosseum until the twentieth century.

The Colosseum was built by the Emperor Vespain to “please the people”, meaning to provide entertainment to distract people from their dreary lives. It was inaugurated in 80 AD. We have all heard about the gladiator fights to the death that took place there. It turned out that the gladiators were foreign soldiers taken as prisoners of war. The prisoners had to fight one another to stay alive. BTW, the word gladiator comes from the name of the type of sword the fighters in the shows used. We have all heard about the lions that ate the Christians. It turns out that anyone seen as a political rebel, including refusing to worship the Roman Emperor as a god, was captured and put to death in a creative manner. They were always trying to come up with ever more ingenious ways to torture and murder to entertain the masses. Being eaten alive by lions was just one of the many inventions. The people greatly enjoyed the creative murder shows, but what they really loved was the animal fights. The emperor would import exotic animals from Asia and Africa and have the animals fight to the death. The people loved seeing the exotic creatures, especially in action. After the show was over, the meat of the animals would be given to the attendees. Meat was expensive and few could afford it, and they loved the emperor for importing exotic meats for their consumption. While importing the animals was expensive, it was a small price to pay to make the masses happy.

The Colosseum was once three stories of solid marble, with a wooden top floor that makes the original building that much taller than what you see today. After the Colosseum was eventually abandoned, the marble was taken to be used in other buildings and monuments that were going up. The Vatican and local churches have a big percentage of Colosseum marble in them. Only 20% of the original Colosseum stands today. Much of it has been reconstructed in brick. The marble that is left has lots of small holes in it. Back then, no mortar was used in construction (nor in Greek and Egyptian times, either), but they did use rebar (we don’t think the Greeks or Egyptians used rebar, but were not sure). When people needed metal, they would just dig the rebar out from the marble blocks. It was ornately adorned with columns, statues, and so forth. There were awnings over the seats to protect people from the weather. The design included 80 entrances/exits. A similar layout with lots of exits is pretty standard for stadiums today, but at the time, the concept of being able to fill up and empty out a stadium so big in a matter of minutes was unimaginable. The exits were called vomitoriums (vomit is Latin for fast exit). A small piece of stage has been recreated so you get a sense of what it looked like in its day, but the majority of the “backstage” (underneath) is exposed. It is a network of halls and rooms where they kept the prisoners, animal cages, sets, and so forth. They used elevators to raise the cages/people up to the stage. The stage was made of wood, and usually covered in sand to soak up the blood.

After the tour guide was done talking, we had a few minutes to walk around the stadium before the next tour began. The next tour was turned out to be the Palantine and Forum combined. Both areas are huge with tons of ruins. The tour guide did a fantastic job telling us about the areas we covered, but we only covered about a third of the ruins. The fact that we missed so much was something of a let down, and we wished we had gotten the audio guides, instead.

The Palantine entrance is just a few blocks southwest of the Colosseum. On the way, we passed the Arc de Constantino, built to honor Constantine for a war victory. To give you a sense of distance the sites are from one another, this photo of the arch was taken from the second floor of the Colosseum, facing southwest, and you can see a little of the Palantine to the right.

There are seven hills that made up Rome back in the early days. The Palantine is, according to legend, the actual location where Romulus supposedly founded Rome back in 753 BC. The Palantine was Rome’s poshest neighborhood, where aristocrats and emperors built mansions. In the 1st century AD, Emperor Domition decided to build the greatest house of all time on the Palantine hill, which is where the word palace comes from. The palace spanned an acre, and to create that much space, a previous emperor’s home and many more private homes were torn down. The palace was three stories tall and had a private stadium in it. It served as the main imperial palace for 300 years.

We went in the formal entrance gate and followed a nice path up the hill. It is grassy and has some trees. Thanks to all the recent rain, it is green and pretty. At the top of the hill, the first ruin we came to was the private stadium where the emperor staged all kinds of events for the amusement of himself and his friends. The building to the left was living quarters and a private bath house, but we didn’t go there. A similar looking, but much larger, structure to the right was part of the living quarters, which we didn’t go to either.

Directly behind where we were standing were scattered bits of walls here and there. You could tell it was once a building with many rooms, but it was now so decomposed that there was virtually no way to tell what it was. Turns out these are the remains of the primary living quarters, which were once grand and spectacular. The intact building behind the remains is a church, which we also didn’t go see.

We walked forward a little ways to a large grass field, which we were told was the banquet room located on the rooftop garden of the former palace. This is in the more public portion of the palace, as opposed to the more private living quarters. The building behind the banquet hall in the photo was originally a convent and is now a museum holding artifacts found on the Palantine. We didn’t go there either. To the far right are some ruins of the Emperor’s mansion that was destroyed to make Domition’s palace. We have no idea what the building in the back right corner is.

Then we went over to the Roman Forums, which is in the valley on the north side of Palantine hill and west of the Colosseum. We were bummed that the Palantine tour was already over. We knew there were more sights to see, including Augustus Octavian’s house and the house of Octavian’s wife, Livia, and some gardens.

To be continued”¦