As with Vatican
City, we had to do some preliminaries before we could get into the
coliseum. We rode the subway to a
station close to the coliseum. We met
our local guide who took us to, yes, you guessed it, a church!
This one had
something other than art to display. The
present-day church was built on top of not one but two other churches. Down into the bowels of the earth we
went. The floor we walked on was on a
level with some old faded artwork that at one time was high on the wall of the previous
church.
Apparently, they “cut”
the old walls down and used the stone to fill the old church up to make a
foundation for the new church. Then the modern
archaeologists came in and excavated pathways and discovered the old walls and
a few artifacts of the previous church.
We went down
once more and found the first church.
Things down that deep weren’t in such good shape, but we could see where
the old walls had been and how they had been knocked down part of the way to
make a foundation for the second church.
I was reminded of
the Jarvik Center in York, England. When
the cathedral there threatened to fall over, they did an emergency dig to build
a huge new foundation for it. In the process,
they found three different civilizations, one from medieval days, one from
Roman days (the Roman aqueducts were still functioning) and one from Celtic and
Viking days.
Being two
stories down was impressive and oppressive.
It was chilly, damp, and dark down there. After a brief rest during which we spread out
to various coffee shops to find restrooms, we regathered in front of the church
and commenced our march on the Coliseum.
It was quite warm
above ground. We didn’t know what to
expect weather wise and had packed jackets and even long underwear for our
Italy trip. We only had one day when it
threatened to rain on us, and most days we ended up carrying our jackets, it
was that warm. We were informed that it
can be quite miserably hot in the summer time visiting the Coliseum.
One of the advantages of being with a group,
someone else stood in line and got the tickets, so we only had to stand and
wait our group’s turn at the turnstiles.
Entering the Coliseum was further delayed by everyone going through a
metal detector.
So we had plenty of time to gawk at the
exterior of the place.
Martin, our guide
The place was
quite crowded, and again we were told that this was light traffic compared to
the summer crowds. Who would want to go in
the summer if the weather is hot and miserable and the crowds are huge?
As we walked
around the upper level, not quite the highest level, we couldn’t help but
compare the Coliseum to a modern sports stadium. The ramps and stairs outside the arena, the
archways for entering and exiting, the bowl shape designed to accommodate a lot
of spectators leads again to that question:
How did those guys build so well in those olden days? How did they know to do all that they
did? What machinery did they have to
raise stone walls that high and that strong?
I have watched a
couple of documentaries on the Coliseum.
One was speculation on how the contestants got into the arena. They may have had hand operated elevators to
bring them up to arena level. There were
tunnels and pathways to channel the contestants to the right part of the
field. We didn’t get to see much of
that.
A lot of the
Coliseum is being renovated. That is,
they are trying to restore things to the original and keep the place from
falling apart. In a city full of ancient
ruins, you see a lot of restoration work going on.
As you stand
there gazing at the 2000 year old structure, another thought enters your
head: If those walls could talk, what
horror stories of human slaughter could they tell? What kind of person would find that
entertaining? Maybe we have progressed
beyond that. Maybe.
Leaving the
Coliseum, we once again stood and waited.
This time, Martin, our guide, went in search of a lost soul who had
somehow got separated from the flock.
Once our number was restored, we took a shorter tour of some other ruins
in the neighborhood that are in the process of being restored.
We were reminded
that in the early Christian era, the popes often demanded that pagan structures
be destroyed. But the Romans were quite
good at recycling, which explained why in a lot of buildings, the columns don’t
always match, because they were removed from some pagan structure and used to
build a church. One column could come
from one building and its mate could be from another destroyed building.
One of the last
things we saw as we left, a church sat up on a little hill among all the other
old buildings. It was in opposition to
the church we had visited earlier. It
had been built on ground level (an old painting showed it sitting at street
level). Sometime after it was built, the
earth was removed from around it leaving it on its own little hill. A set of stone steps had been added, which
led up to the entrance.
We divided into
two groups after our local guide left us.
Martin took most of the group to the subway. He pointed out that we were really in walking
distance to our hotel. We only had to
walk across a giant courtyard, through a city center and we would be on the
main street where we had alighted from our bus two days previous.
We elected to
walk, but I have heard too many times in my life, “you can’t miss it.” We teamed up with two or three other couples
and away we went. Needless to say, I
wasn’t in the lead. Randy had a cell
phone and used the navigation feature quite well. We stuck close to him.
Our leaders didn’t
seem to need guidance. We ambled across
a beautiful garden, through a few tunnels and came out at a city center. My landmark was a chariot with four horses
high atop a building. We had viewed them
from many different angles during our day.
They were to our back when we reached the city center.
Martin said, “Just
straight across” the “circus” it would be called in London. The streets were
like the spokes of a wheel, and the center was the hub. Darned if I could figure out “straight across”,
so we followed our two leaders. They
seemed to know intuitively which was “our” street.
We worked our
way carefully across two streets and took the third one. Soon we began to see familiar streets and
buildings and we were back to our hotel.
As I recall that experience, I am reminded of one other thing about
Rome. Pedestrians do not have the right
of way. You had better by gosh watch
where you are walking.
Well sir, after
the Coliseum, our tour was nearly finished.
We had our last group dinner that evening. The wine flowed freely and it got a bit
noisy. A Roman family had the misfortune
to sit near the 28 of us. After about 15
minutes, a few of them got up from their table.
I thought maybe they were leaving because we were too noisy.
I asked the
patriarch if we were too noisy. He shook
his head no. Then I saw they were
letting a couple of their ladies out to visit the powder room, so I relaxed. The man came over to me and said, “Is not a
question in Rome.” We laughed. Being too noisy is not possible in Rome, I
guess.
Technically, our
tour ended on the morrow, but the only thing left was one more hotel
breakfast. Martin greeted us at
breakfast and bid us farewell. He was
off to the subway, to the train station, where he would take a train to Venice
and start the same tour with another group in three or four days. Hmmm.
Not the way I would like to make a living, but it suited Martin.
Many of our number
were off after breakfast, too. A few of
our number stayed one more night in the hotel and were off Friday morning. Another couple stayed until Saturday. We ran into them at the hotel Friday
evening. They had walked the
neighborhood visiting churches. They
couldn’t believe how many churches there were.
We had gone a
different direction, but with the same experience, seeing many churches. We only visited one, however. The advantage to visiting a church is you set
your own admission fee. If you want to
sit and take a rest, you surely may. If
you are inclined (or reclined), you can do quite a lot of art appreciation,
too.
We still had a
day left on our three-day Metro passes, so we decided we had better use them
first and our shoe leather after they expired.
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