We have reservations for the bullet train, the super high speed train, the Frecciarossa—Firenze Campo di Marte to Roma Termini in an hour and a half, at speeds of some 200 miles per hour. I have never been to Rome, I have never been on a bullet train, this is very exciting.
The train is at 9:30. We will walk to the station. We will walk even though the lady at the hotel said to take a taxi. We will walk because I’m crazy, but we will walk, and we do walk, and we get there very much ahead of time. In spite of two stops for assorted breakfast pastries and drinks. So we sit in the station and we wait. Waiting is not what George does best, he fidgets.
Campo di Marte is not Florence’s main station. The main station is Santa Maria Novella, next to the church of that name. That’s a head-in station. Because the high speed train is looking to get through quickly, it uses Campo di Marte which is a through station. It’s a quiet little sleepy station.
I’m not sure what to expect as far as how long the train will stop. This is a high speed train, it cannot stop for very long I don’t think. Though it does. It stops with plenty of time for us to find our carriage and our seats. But I don’t know that at the time, so I run, and I make George run. The seats are not numbered exactly sequentially like one would expect. I can’t imagine why. We do find seats next to each other that are not exactly our reserved seats that were not next to each other. We sit next to each other and there’s a little table in front of us and two seats across the table. An older lady is sitting across the table. Her traveling companion, a man, is not sitting with her.
A group of three ladies going to Rome on a vacation rearrange themselves from their own separate assigned seats to the seats across the aisle from us. They talk the whole entire time. They are nice but quite boring, though clearly they enjoy each other’s company. They have a Michelin guide to Rome that they are consulting. I’m not used to seeing Italians with guides, more so the non-Italians.
By the by, the ladies across the aisle pull out little snacks, and so does the lady across from us. On the way back we will find out again that everyone brings little snacks, little cookies, little sandwiches, little juice drinks. George asks, “Why don’t we have snacks?” We are not following proper high speed train protocol or absorbing the full experience that would involve eating a snack.
From the train station, the Colosseum is not far, so—map in hand—we walk down some streets, by a church, through a park. As we get to the end of the park, there are tour buses parked along the curb, we must be near something touristy.
We see a piece of a large gray building behind some trees, and I’m not completely sure, but I do believe that’s it! That’s it!
“George, look, that’s it, that’s the Colosseum!”
We rush to get past the trees to see it better. And it is, it is the Colosseum. It’s right in front of us, and it’s huge, and it looks like it’s supposed to look.
George says, “I was going to try to be cool about it, but actually I’m really excited.”
We walk down to it, and then we’re not sure what to do. Is there an entrace? Where is the entrance? We find the exit and we’re told the entrance is on the opposite side. It’s really big to walk around, and it’s really hot and sunny.
We find the entrance and there is a really big line. A really big line.
“George, do you want to go inside?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because this is the line, it’s really big.”
“I want to go inside.”
“Okay.”
I have to agree with him, we need to go inside. Normally with a big line I would say, we’ll do it next time, but there is no next time here, we have to go inside today.
We stand in line with many other people. It’s hot. The line is disciplined. It’s a bit wide, some four people across, but it’s disciplined
Next to us there’s an odd couple, an older American man and a lovely younger Philippine woman. They are clearly a couple, but a couple with friction. He is boastful and she’s resentful.
He boasts, “You can ask me for anything. You asked me to buy you the fan you’re holding.”
“I bought the fan I’m holding, you wouldn’t buy it for me.”
“But you were free to ask me for it.”
How not to win an argument with a woman.
A Colosseum worker comes alongside the line and explains in English, Italian and French that there is a guided tour available in each of the languages. The cost is 4 euros per person and if you are interested you can exit the line and follow him. Can this be for real? Only a few people are taking him up on it.
I ask him, “How long will this line take?”
“About a half hour.”
“I want the guided tour.”
We exit the line and follow him loosely to another line. I’m very confused, I’m not sure which other line we should be in. I feel that George will feel my stress and go into panic mode. I’m trying to be calm. Somehow I end up in what I think is the correct line.
The American with the Philippine woman are now next to us in line. He’s also confused and stressed. He’s asking for further information. The 4 euros for the guided tour are in addition to the admission fee of 12 euros. He’s disputing this with the Colosseum worker, who is engaged in discussions with him, he’s staying with him even though he really could ignore him. I wonder at that, what makes this Colosseum worker who works in this absolute chaos of an environment stay engaged when this man is arguing with him—unreasonably at that.
The worker argues cogently, “Why would you think that a guides tour would cost 8 euros less than general admission?” Is this man trying to impress his woman?
We finally get to the window and buy our admissions. It turns out George gets in for free, which I didn’t expect, so instead of paying 24 euros for the two of us in the long line, we pay 12 euros for me and 4 euros each for the tour, a total of 20 euros. I jump the line and save 4 euros!
I ask the ticket agent, “Do I have to wait for the tour?” This is the last hurdle, the tour doesn’t start for another half hour.
“Signora, once you’re inside you can move about as you please.”
Success! Though we should really take the tour and learn all kinds of things, we don’t.
We put our tickets through a turnstile and enter. It is still enormously confusing. We manage to go right and into the arena area. We walk a bit. But what we would like to do is go upstairs. How do we get upstairs? We go back the way we came and I’m terrified that we will accidentally exit and have to go through the line again. That is my fear at that moment. We make our way around the Coloseum and finally get to stairs to go up.
There is an exhibit of artifacts found in the Coloseum over the years. Among them are animal bones, a bear skull being the most interesting specimen. There are other exhibits of replicas of gladiator outfits, many of them. They’re pretty cool.
“Why did the Romans have brushes on their helmets?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
We wander some more and then George is done. We find our way back downstairs following some people down stairs labeled “Emergency only.” George knows we’re being illegal and starts to point it out to me but then wisely keeps silent and follows me down the stairs.
We then have to make our way all the way around and across to the other side for the exit.
Outside, there are a couple of souvenir stands and one single food stand. George wants to buy something to eat. The single food stand is sitting on the sweltering asphalt outside the Coloseum, there is no place to sit. I tell George, “Let’s go somewhere else, somewhere in the shade.”
He’s furious with me, he wants something now, but I move on.
We go by an arch and then have two false starts trying to walk through some of the adjoining ruins. We have to turn back, the areas are fenced off. This is very aggravating. The place is huge, and we’re being corraled so we can’t just walk. We end up having to walk down the avenue, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, beautiful name, nasty walk. Crowded. Very sunny and hot. No respite from the heat, no shade. We do buy some water.
Around the Colosseum there are people dressed in gladiator outfits that pose for pictures. We do not induldge but it’s fun and funny.
Halfway up the Via dei Fori Imperiali there’s a little visitor center. We go in, and there’s a snack stand—possibly the most pitiful snack stand in all of Italy, though there is some shade and there are some chairs. George wants to eat here. I tell him, “George, this is the most pathetic snack stand in all of Italy.”
He doesn’t see it at all, but I’m the one who has a hissy fit now, and he backs off.
Inside the little visitor center building there is a model of the forums as they used to be, and he likes that. I don’t really know what a forum is. I will have to research that.
We keep moving. We see many ruins from the avenue, but we can’t deviate, there’s no access from where we are. There are pieces of ruined marble strewn around the ground. There’s a column, Trajan’s colum, with little scenes carved all along the height of it.
At this point I give up on Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, I don’t think we can make it there. We head for the Trevi Fountain next. Along the way, we walk through small crowded streets looking for something to eat that’s not in the sun and not standing up. And not unbelievably crowded hopefully, which every place seems to be.
Suddenly we see the golden arches. George lights up.
“Okay, we can go to McDonald’s.”
It’s pretty crowded also but we do it.
They give me a Coke glass made of glass. I tell them I don’t need it. The lady says, “It’s a free gift.”
I tell her, “We’re traveling, it will break, but thank you.” That’s all I need, to schlep a Coke glass made of glass through Rome the rest of the day. How many of the other people there that day need to carry a glass in their bags?
They charge us for ketchup and mustard.
After lunch we head to the Trevi Fountain, now very close. I had always imagined it as a very large fountain in a very large piazza. Instead it’s a very large fountain in a very small piazza. It takes up the entire piazza—there’s barely a bit of space to walk around it. It is pretty fabulous. George loves it. He wants to through a Euro coin in the fountain and we both do.
There are many, many people all around the fountain and a vigile urbano who keeps them in check with a whistle. When he whistles everyone looks: you got whistled.
Next we go to the Spanish Steps, really Piazza di Spagna and the Trinita’ dei Monti. We get ice cream and I have a confusing experience because I order the Nutella flavor and what I get looks and tastes like stracciatella. I’m aggravated but the man selling ice cream to all kinds of people from all over the world has an aggravating job and I don’t have the heart to enter into a dispute with him. I try to pawn it on George who likes stracciatella and he does trade me for his chocolate ice cream. After a while he decides he made a bad trade and asks to trade back. He gives me my mystery flavor back and by now he’s got the melting ice cream dripping all over the cone, so our hands are all sticky.
There is a small fountain at the base of the steps with a little spigot at which people are lined up. We line up too so we can wash the ice cream sticky off our hands.
This also looks different than I expected: I always thought they were more festive but they’re not that festive, maybe because it’s hot and no one is sitting on the steps in the sun. There are a few people sitting in a sliver of shade and we join them for a while.
Then we climb the steps. Hot. There are vendors selling Louis Vuitton bags along the way.
At the top, there’s an obelisk in front of the church, a real Egyptian obelisk. From the top, there’s a view of St. Peter’s dome in the very distance, so we can say we saw St. Peter’s. If it comes up.
We start to make our way back to Roma Termini, the train station. It’s a little early for that, but we have done our itinerary and we are exhausted. On the way, we stop by the Piazza del Quirinale. There is a phenomenally attired guard at the door, with long plumes streaming down from his helmet.
~.~.~
On the final leg back to the station we stop to eat something at what looks like a quaint Victorian “tea room.” It’s near the train station so I should have known that it would be neither Victorian nor a tea room.
A nice waiter seats us down. We are seated next to the kitchen door, and someone inside is screaming. I don’t really know what he’s saying, but our waiter is asking him to keep it down. Asking him repeatedly, and the guy keeps hollering. Our waiter is visibly upset about it.
At a table near the door there is a tall thin man in skinny jeans looking at a laptop. He is wearing a wedding ring and he is sitting with a woman who looks like a hooker. She could be his wife but I don’t think so. After a while I realize he owns the place, though when he asks a question no one answers him.
I eat the worst ham sandwich I’ve ever eaten, and the waiter continues to be very nice—the only sane person in the place.
