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On Thursday, May 29 Anne, Sandy, Craig and I departed for Rome. Before our trip I tried to brush up on some of my history knowledge. I knew how powerful the Roman empire was along with some background on Romulus and Remus and their story, and some famous architecture I would be seeing. Looking back, I could have taken a semester course before I left and would not have been able to cover half of their history with enough detail to know about everything we had witnessed.

We arrived late Thursday night and headed straight to the hotel for bed. On Friday morning we ate breakfast and took the Metro to the Colosseum. The "Metro" is Roma's subway line which is more or less the publics graffiti wall. We had a tour of the Colosseum, one of the greatest works of Roman architecture, and could once seat around 50,000 spectators when built almost 2000 years ago. Viewing this enormous stadium was very impressive. Our tour offered us some great insight on some of the myths and facts about its use. It goes to show how much we think we change, when in reality, we are still using and replicating many of the same things the Romans were using 2000 years ago. We just decided to make things more complicated.

After the Colosseum, we joined a tour of Palatine Hill, the largest of the seven hills in Rome. This hill is where Rome was founded based on the story of Romulus and Remus and once was the original home to much of the art and marble found in The Vatican. There once stood a palace here that had over a mile perimeter for the Roman emperors such as Augustus. It overlooks Circus Maximus and the Roman Forum, along with the rest of Rome. After a snack and some Peroni's we headed to our final "twilight" tour of Roma and some of it's famous sights. We started at the Spanish Steps and ventured around the Eternal City for three hours. We viewed many of the famous streets along with the Pantheon, Trevi fountain, The Unknown Solider and the Piazza de Spagna among with many other sights.

Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to Vatican City which I will talk about in my next post. Until next time.

Posted by Wes at 12:34 PM