Italy 13: A Not So Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Our last day in Rome, we checked out and dropped our bags off at the train station storage. We took the metro back to the Colesseum, which has a stop right in front of it - very handy. Outside the Colesseum is a lot of people offering tours. Since we really liked the one at St. Peters, we thought one for the Colesseum might be helpful. One group was offering for 10 euro, and we talked them down to 9. So, there were about 20 people and the guy walked us around the perimeter for about an hour talking about the history and progression of rulers, etc. He also mentioned that the movie Gladiator has a bunch of inaccuracies...it sounded like historians were really pissed off about it. Very interesting stuff. He then gave us tickets to enter the Colesseum but did not go in with us. He said that in a couple hours another tour guide would be available to give us a tour of Palatine Hill, which would be free. Palatine Hill is next to the Forum and was once the ritzy area to live in..it's got some cool ruin structures. Anyways, they've opened a lot of the inside of the Colesseum, so you can walk around and get a sense of the scale. They've also built a fake floor over part of it so you can understand how the bottom passageways worked and what the spectators would have seen. After that we went to lunch (and had our worst meal in Italy....on our last day too! sigh....) and went back to meet the tour guide for Palatine Hill. We ran into some of the other people from our earlier tour, and about 18 people showed up. Then, this scrawny kid with a bad So California accent came and said since he didn't have a ticket for Palatine Hill, he was just going to do a tour of the Forum, which is free. Everyone got pretty pissed at that cause Palatine Hill didn't have an audio guide or something to tell you what was what, and the Forum did. Then he said that some people had been given invalid tickets and they wouldn't work at Palatine Hill. It was all very shady. So, we just wandered around Palatine Hill by ourselves and it was quite pretty. Then we headed back to the train station, picked up our luggage, and took the airport shuttle to the Hilton at the Rome Airport. Mike booked us rooms with his Hilton points so it would be easy for us to catch our flight in the morning. More on that in the next post.

WILL ADD PICTURES ONCE BLOGGER STOPS ANNOYING ME.

11/11/06 - don't know why, but it really doesn't want to post my pics of the colesseum. Sorry!