Sew Not My Day!: Day 8 - Mediterranean Cruise

Mediterranean Cruise - ROME!

part 1

Thursday!!!

We had breakfast in the buffet and enjoyed the views.

The sea was calm and weather was nice! We did bring our coats but tied them around our waists later.

The bus ride to Rome from the port in Civitavecchia was around 1.5 hours.

Teresa was concerned about us getting to the tour on time so as soon as the bus stopped in Rome at the Roma Ostiense station, we decided NOT to walk the 30 minutes (just over 2 kilometers) to the Colosseum.

So we took a taxi.

The driver was very nice and gave us lots of info about the areas that we were driving past.

And the closest he could without getting stuck in the traffic around the Colosseum was to take us to a road under construction.

What a view! huh?!

So we walked past all the construction, down some stairs

and all the way around it.

I must have 100 pictures of just the structure! Just kidding. But not by much.

and then we walked past it. Waittt.... guys!

The tour company was just past here on the right. We got there in time to use a restroom and get a pop at a convenience store next to their meeting spot.

Check out the ceiling in this building! Zoom in if you can. I guess it helped with acoustics but isn't it cool?! It's the Clivo Di Venere Felice.

Below:

Someone's house with a beautiful view of history!

and more residential areas that come out right across the street from the colosseum!

Wouldn't it be fantastic to live there?!

waiting for the tour to start.

Our tour guide is in the jacket below. Everyone made sure we had our passports and tickets with us and off we went with the guide talking to us all with the ear buds again so we could hear him talk. Wow was he knowledgeable!

We walked back to the colosseum and then off to the right of it. Here is the Triumphal Arch of Constantine, which stands right next to the Colosseum itself.

I'm glad we did the tour because we got to walk past everyone and go through a special security.

On on to more Arches! This one is the Arch of Titus.

The pictures show the story of the construction of the Colosseum

As well as the captives brought here as slaves from Jerusalem. You can see the menorah as well as an ark, possibly of the covenant. Don't know. The Romans pawned these treasures to fund the construction of the Colosseum.

We continued walked around the Palatine Hill, which is the start of Rome.

Remember this pic from my visit to Pisa? The origin is actually the legend of the beginning of Rome.

Legend is that twins Remus and Romulus were raised by a She-Wolf. One killed the other and if you can guess which one won, the city was named after him.

Our guide said that the original text said Lupa in that language and besides "wolf" also translates to "prostitute" so the legend might have been tweaked a little for more color. :)

At one point, the others told me later that a group of 3 young guys tried to talk to me but with my hearing and concentrating on our guide didn't hear them. So they went up to our guide and he was chatting away telling us history. They asked him to repeat something and he said sharply, "I'm not talking to you! I've got a tour group." lol!

They hung around on the walk anyway and listened in.

The grounds here were gorgeous and a bit sad. For several hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, dirt and silt settled over all of this with only some of the remains sticking up in the grass and cows grazed here. It was in the 1400s and up when the excavations took off uncovering all this history.

This palace was a beautiful love story. An arranged marriage, but Emperor Antonius and his wife Faustina fell in love. When she died, he was distraught and built a palace for her body, put her in it and then burned it down. In that time and their culture, if you cremated someone, it made them a deity.

And then he had it rebuilt in her honor.

There is a statue of her at the top of the steps but it's hard to see here as she's in shadows.

As we listen intently! There were about 10-14 in our group.

This is the Arch of Septimius Severus to honor his military success of the first Severan Emperor.

JUST over that hill behind it, is the place where Julius Caesar was murdered.

Et tu Brute?

His friends brought his body down to the center of the ancient city and even though he was cremated (again - because of the cremation, now he's a deity) people still put flowers on this spot.

These are the remains of the temple of Castor and Pollux in the same grounds.

The story behind the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. There were 40 Roman soldiers around 320AD who were martyred for their Christian faith by being forced onto a frozen lake naked. One of the soldiers changed his mind and wanted to live instead, so he walked off the lake. One of the guards watching this, declared his own faith in Christ, took off his uniform and took the place of the one who left.

Tradition holds that as soon as the one who left the lake stepped into the warm water they had for him, he died instantly.

The 40 on the lake were dead by morning and then they were burned.

One of the Roman rulers wives was moved by the story and had this fresco painted to honor the 40.

Then he led through some of the more modern palaces that still stand there.

more stories about their lives and deaths

Murderers in the families

There is the story of Livia Drusilla, an ex-wife of the Emperor Augustus. She poisoned him as well as a lot of the heirs until her son, by another man, became Emperor Tiberius. Actually it may have been Agrippina and Emperor Claudius.

They both used poison to get their kids on the throne. And yeah, probably Agrippina as she was the 4th wife of Claudius, who had been having trouble getting an heir. Her son was Nero.