We got off to a sluggish start today. Outside of our apartment is a café that keeps hopping late into the night. My room is at the other end of the apartment, so it isn’t bad. For the others, it makes it difficult to fall asleep. By the time we got showered and out to a café for breakfast, it was almost noon! We headed to the Colosseum. It was a really beautiful day, but it was hotter than yesterday, leading to even more sluggishness.
However, once we got into the Roman ruins, everyone started to perk up. It is not just the age of everything that is so impressive, but the scope of human ingenuity and creativity- so inspirational. We went into the Colosseum and took a brief tour. It is amazing place for such different reasons. The engineering feats involved – how the constructed the entire thing in 8 years and how the underground levels led to so many trap doors within the arena – are amazing, but then of course it is a place of death (and not just death, but death with spectators and cheering). The morality behind the building is horrific: killing animals and people so others will be amused, even as the place is so amazing and impressive to experience.
Afterwards, we went to a café for lunch and that revitalized us once again. We called Rosie via WhatsApp for her birthday, and a bunch of people in the café joining in our singing to her. Next, we rode the subway to the Capuchin Crypt. The rooms of the crypt are decorated with the bones of thousands of monks; some are dedicated to specific bones like the pelvic bone or the skull. Above your head are chandeliers made out of bones too. It was for them a great honor to have their bones included, but it is pretty unsettling to walk through. So, we had a lot of death today.
Later, we wondered the streets doing some shopping and people watching. We got dinner at a restaurant that Simeon recommended. We ended our night back at Piazza Novona. There are guys selling these plastic arrow type things that light up and you launch into the air using a large rubber band. We bought a bunch of them (for the cousins and our friends), and we had a ball shooting them into the sky (and eating gelato). It was a great ending to an amazing first experience of Roma! Since we tossed our coins in the Trevi Fountain, we know that we will be coming back!
