Italy Vacation – Day 2: Rome – 9.10.13

After a busy first day in Rome, it was another jammed packed day of activity with visits to The Colosseum, The Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, and the Trastevere area.

Before we came to Italy, we pre-booked a tour of the Colosseum with the dungeons and upper level included. If you buy a ticket just for the Colosseum, you usually just get to go on the main level and the first floor of the famous Colosseum. But this tour you get to do more than that, plus it included entry to The Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. The one thing about Italy is if you plan on seeing all the sights, you have to pre-book EVERYTHING, if not you’re sitting on lines for 3 hours and who wants to wait on line for hours on your vacation? Not me!

Since our tour for the Colosseum started at 12pm, we had a couple of hours to kill at The Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. It was really cool walking around all the ruins. I still have no idea what I saw besides a bunch of rocks and crumbled buildings so having some sort of audio guide or a guide telling you what everything would probably be helpful. We underestimated how long everything was going to take to walk around, but managed to see the majority of the stuff in 2 hours or so. We had to rush and get over to the Colosseum so we didn’t miss our tour.

Seeing the Colosseum was awesome! I was just trying to imagine all the stuff that happened there but just kept thinking of Gladiator. As soon as you walk inside of it, you just can’t help but snap away with all the pictures. I kind of wish we saw this earlier in the day when the light might have been better but the time slot wasn’t available to us. The best was going on the 2nd level (or was it 3rd level) and just seeing everything from above. Thankfully I borrowed my brother’s wide angle to get some almost fisheye shots.

After seeing all of that, I think we went back to the Hotel to rest up and then go back out walking around the Trastevere area. We wanted to grab something to eat in that area but we couldn’t really decide on a place. It was nice walking around that area even though it seemed like a lot of homeless people were staying there. I got the feeling from looking at a few people that the locals weren’t as friendly in this area. We kept walking back and forth trying to find a restaurant, almost got caught in a storm but the storm didn’t turn out that bad. We finally just caved and ate at some restaurant that was eh. The thing with a lot of restaurants in Italy is if the place is outside or in a some square, it’s considered a tourist trap. Meaning the food isn’t as good, and the prices are a lot higher. That was definitely true in Venice as well. If you do go to Italy for a vacation, I would definitely recommend researching some places to eat at. Our meal wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as other meals we had on the trip.

After the meal, I wanted to walk across the river and by the Colosseum area again and take some night shots. It wasn’t raining yet but the clouds were very eerie. It did shower or two while we were eating but wasn’t when we were walking. Kristen and I ended up going down to the Colosseum again and taking pictures. Wish the damn scaffolding wasn’t around the Colosseum. Seemed like everything in Italy was under construction. But it was still neat to see the Colosseum at night.

We started to walk back and BAM…DOWNPOUR for 20 minutes! We had to walk in that for that long and by the time we go back to the room, we were drenched. It’s funny because I was taunting the weather before that saying it was pussy rain because it would rain for 2 seconds and then stop. Well the Rain Gods had the last laugh and got us soaked, even with umbrellas haha. It was an experience to say the least.

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Tags: Italy, Italy Vacation, Nikon D800, Palatine Hill, Roman Forum, Rome, The Colosseum, Trastevere, travel photography