Rome - Colosseum, Crypta Balbi Museum, Palazzo Altemps Museum

The Colosseum is absolutely spectacular. It's big, round, and uncut tall. And it's full of arches. We walked over from our B&B, which was a pleasant 1km walk.

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Although we arrived at opening, the line was already pretty long; we took our guidebook's suggestion and headed over to the Palatine hill entrance and bought our combined ticket there. I'm not sure it's a lot faster, but I hate waiting in lines. We headed up to the second story to take in the view; it's amazing.

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Since I can, I'm going to talk about the Colosseum briefly. The Colosseum was named after the colossal statue of Nero (100 feet?) that was just outside the amphitheater. The Romans razed his palace and built this in (part of) its place. The Colosseum could seat around fifty thousand people. The seating was segregated, and there was a canvas spread over part of the top for shade and rain protection. What you'll see in all the pictures is the below-stage stuff. The floor itself was wooden and covered in sand (to absorb the blood). There were 80 trap doors that were used during plays.

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Next, we headed downstairs (upstairs seems to be closed) for more photos and general gaping.

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There were also some exhibits about gladiators.



We used Rick Steves' free audio guide downloaded in advance to our own MP3 players. We've mostly been avoiding audio guides on this trip after a lot of really disappointing ones in England last year (where language barrier isn't even an excuse), and since we are on a budget, but the Rick Steves ones for Rome have been fantastic in addition to being free. He hasn't made many of them, but I can highly recommend the ones for Italy!

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Afterward, we headed out to Crypta Balbi, a museum/excavation that describes the usage of a building and area as it progressed throughout the ages from residential to industrial and back and forth. While this wasn't all that interesting to us, the archeology student that we chatted with afterward (who explained some of it to us) seemed quite excited about it. Apparently it's one of the few sites in Rome where the medieval stuff was properly excavated, rather than just cleared away to get to the Roman stuff. It seemed pretty apparent that she had read a book or a case study about this place. The museum itself had some artifacts, but was primarily text. The best, but still confusing part was the descent to the excavations in the basement, which was used at some point as a cistern. No idea which time period used it thus.

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We also rather liked the matching dishes.

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Next, we headed off for the National Museum's best sculpture collection at Palazzo Altemps. On the way, we went past some other fountains.

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The Palazzo Altemps in fact contains some awesome sculpture, including Josh's favorite Ares to date. It was also in a cool old building with some lovely, but evidently unimportant, frescoes. (More photos, especially from the Altemps, in the gallery.)

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Along the way, we ran across really cool buildings and ruins we didn't know anything about. I think if you own a home in Rome, you can just forget about adding a basement. I don't think it's possible to put a shovel into the ground without striking some previously buried piece of history!

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