Regina and Meredith N. managed to get up early, breakfast, and still get out for a little shopping in Venice before we were scheduled to meet at 9:15 am. I did not think they would find much open, and they said most shops were closed, but they did find a few open and came back with a few things. They squeezed more time out of Venice. Sadly, we had to leave today.

On to Rome. It is a smooth train ride from Venice to Rome, taking three hours and forty-five minutes. Our hotel in Rome is only three blocks from the train station, so by 3:00 or so we were in our hotel room, topping off water bottles and dropping luggage before heading out to do a quick exploration of the city.

We stopped for a quick light lunch at a nearby pizza place, and then went back into the train station to buy three-day passes to the Metro system. Rome’s Metro is not extensive – only two main lines and a third under construction. It seems that when you dig in Rome, you tend to hit ruins, and then construction stops. Still, the two lines do an okay job of getting you to or near popular sites, so we wanted to get passes.

Enter the slight downside to Italy – sometimes frustrating inefficiency. The first pair of ticket machines we came to had two “helpers” standing at the machines – people who purported to help you figure out the ticket system (which is not hard and has an English option), in exchange for a tip. No problem – I found more machines down the stairs, and we tried using both bills and credit cards, but neither would work. So we tromped back upstairs to the main office, where we finally were able to buy tickets from a real person. We set off on the metro.

The Colosseum metro stop must be the most impressive in the world. You step out of the stop, and your vision is almost entirely filled with seeing the Colosseum. Tim wanted to see three things while in Rome – the Vatican, the Colosseum, and Trajan’s Column. We managed to check off the latter two within the first hour of being in Rome. We wandered around the Colosseum, checking out about half of the outside before turning aside to look at Constantine’s Arch, which commemorates Constantine becoming the sole emperor of the whole Roman Empire (and the battle which led him to adopt Christianity as the preferred religion in Rome). We walked up to the Forum’s gate so Jacob could see Titus’ Arch, which refers to the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Then, we tried to walk up toward the top of the hill to get to the main square around the Victor Emmanuel Monument, but we were hemmed in by Forum gates and construction walls where Rome was building part of the new third subway line. We backtracked to the main road, which did lead us up away from the Colosseum

The Victor Emmanuel monument is enormous – it is hard to grasp how big it is without seeing it. Our Rick Steves guidebook suggested it would be how Rome looked back in Roman times – a huge, sparkling, fairly new monument, and it was even designed in classical style when it was built in the 1860s. That was a helpful suggestion since it is sometimes hard to imagine some of these two-thousand-year-old ruins as new and shiny.

After the VE monument, we ate supper, where we got to eat outside for the third evening in a row. We had a mellow time, even after the entire restaurant was filled inside and partly outside with a huge group of French middle school students. I was amused to see the teachers sit together, light up cigarettes, and order beers and wine.

Refreshed from supper, we followed a walking tour from Rick Steves – we saw several emperor victory columns, some pretty squares, and a bunch of former palaces. We saw the Piazza Navona, which is huge and has a massive Bernini-sculpted fountain in the middle of it, which includes a fake Egyptian obelisk. We saw the outside of the Pantheon, which Jacob claimed to be the most impressive building he has ever seen, and we got to throw coins in the Trevi Fountain (which is supposed to ensure you come back to Rome). We finished the tour at the Spanish Steps, which are a wide and long set of steps that lead up to a pretty church where you have commanding views of Rome, including the dome of the Vatican in the distance.

That ended the tour, and we used the metro to get back to the train station and then walk home. I’ve summarized everything so it may seem short, but it all took over seven hours and resulted in our walking over ten miles for the day. That is a pretty good tour, considering we spent about four hours getting here and only had part of the day for sightseeing.