The Eternal City and the Buried City...

So our journey through Italy continues into Rome, a city of history, power and tourist, tourists and more tourists! Wow, I thought we were travelling in the off season, but it seems there is no off season in Rome, it's just always busy! In spite of the hordes we still had a memorable time in Rome. The first memory we have is not being able to find the hotel we booked for ourselves over the internet once we arrived. It was supposed to be on the street right next to the train station but when we searched for it the street number given to us as an address it corresponded with a Chinese Retaurant with no hotel in sight....hmmm, just a little sketchy. We went back to the train station help desk and they called the number we were given, the first woman couldn't get through, the second guy finally talked to someone and yes indeed our hotel was in a Chinese Restaurant, only it was on the floor above it. So thinking we had gotten our little problem cleared up we headed over there and checked in at the restaurant but it seems chinese is the chosen language of choice for some people in Rome so we really could not communicate at all with the woman showing us to our room. We had a few misunderstandings but when the owner finally arrived an hour or two later (she spoke english) we got everything cleared up and we ended up having a really nice room to stay in. It's all a part of the experience I guess! So we spent two full days in Rome and did some hardcore sightseeing on day number one. We covered the Colosseum, Forum, Palatine Hill, Capitoline Hill, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, and visited Piazzas galore! It was really cool to see ruins stemming from an Empire that pretty much controlled the world about 2000 years ago, but most of the sights are just that, in ruin. You want to be able to connect with what you're seeing and understand the meaning of it all but it's hard when what's left to look at doesn't resemble the way the area looked in the past at all. I bought a souvenir book that has transparent pages you can put on top of the pictures of the ruins to see what they looked like back in the day of the Roman Empire which really did help with the visualization. But Christine and I decided to take it a step further, we happened upon a Blockbuster Video store on our walk home that day and thought we could take advantage of the built in DVD player in the TV in our room. So Christine signed up for a Blockbuster membership in Rome and we rented Gladiator. It was really insightful to have seen all the Roman sights that day and then to see them in action and in context in a movie, really a lot of fun and the way it should be done! Not all of the sights are so hard to visualize though....some are still just as gorgeous today as they were when they were built, especially the Trevi Fountain. I think that was my favourite sight in Rome by far. The next day we decided to devote to seeing the Vatican City and it's museums. It's good thing we devoted that much time because we had to wait an hour to even get into the place! The line was huge and it snaked all the way around the walls enclosing the Vatican City. I would love to say it was worth the wait but it was really hard to see all the museum had with soooooo many people trying to see the same thing! We really only came to see the Sistine Chapel and when we finally found it, it was so full of people you could just feel the temperature change as you walked in. I really was very impressed by the Sistine Chapel, it's not how imagined it would look, but it's definately beautiful and very worth seeing. There's a lot of other art worth seeing that I didn't get a good look at but I guess that what books and documentaries are good for! The Raphael rooms looked very intriguing as I got pushed through them so I think I'll have to take a look at them online or something later. After leaving the museum portion of the Vatican, we made our way to St. Peter's Square. Huge courtyard, nice fountains, Pope makes speeches there, NEXT. My non-catholic ways seemed to create a little disinterest there, although the courtyard itself was very impressive! The afternoon was still early and the sun was still shining so we headed over to the Villa Borghese to chill out in the gardens for awhile. Sitting in the sun, taking in the Roman skyline it was all very ideal. Now Christine and I have been doing our best to eat at interesting and authentic Italian reaturants and food, but in Rome we were met with a McDonalds at almost every turn and so we could no longer resist the Golden Arches and bought it twice! I feel guilty about it, but when it's so cheap and so satisfying after a long day we just had to! But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing so no more McD's for awhile! After Rome we headed south to visit some more ruins, only I don't think we were expecting to see such a shift in the social stratus as we gazed out the train windows. Our books told us that as you go south in Italy it tends to get a bit poorer, but it became blatantly obvious given some of the modern ruins we saw outside our window. It wasn't so bad but people living in RV's on side roads with their laundry drying on the public fences was a little unexpected. Christine and I seemed to encounter some Ghana similarities as moved south. In spite of that Pompeii was a nice place to visit. We got a little lost looking for the hostel but were greeted warmly upon arrival and even spent some time with fellow travellers after a long day at the excavation site of ancient Pompeii. Pompeii was marvelous! I remember learning baout this place even when I was in elementary school so I was really excited to go. The whole story behind the place is so intrigueing as well. In 79 A.D. Mt. Vesuvius which hovers over the town, erupted and buried the place with ash and pumice stone. A lot of people died and over time the place was forgotten but in 1748 it was found by accident and so much history has been unearthed there. It was so cool to walk the old streets of Pompeii as it would have been 2000 years ago. The only disappointment was that a lot of the precious artifacts that were found are no longer at the ruins but have been moved to the Museum in Naples. Again, it would have been even more amazing if they could have left the artifacts in Pompeii to allow visitors a sense of context when viewing the pieces but I guess for safety reasons they decided to move them. They didn't take it all though. There still was some old frescoes and mosaic floor designs that were beautiful and the most interesting and even heart breaking thing was the plaster casts that were made of the cavities the dead human bodies left behind in the ash and stone from the eruption. I'm definately glad we decided to stop in Pompeii to see this piece of history. So Italy really has started to grow on me...in spite of the language dfferences here we have been able to get by and it's been a really great experience so far. I might even have to get a Vespa when I get home!