Day 1

Wednesday was Ancient Day. Celia and I went to the colosseum, the Forum Romanum, the Imperial Forae of Augustus and Julius Caesar, the Palatine (which was quite welcomingly breezy after the burning searing heat of the forum below), and Trajan's column. We also visited the Mamartine Prison, which is the prison where Peter and Paul were kept before their executions, and is the setting for the Biblical story of the conversion of the Roman centurion. there is an eternal spring that springs up from the floor of the prison, from which Paul (if I remember correctly) took water to baptize the jailer. No one knows why the spring is there, but it was the spot where the Romans threw high-profile prisoners, as well as Vestal Virgins who had been caught doing non-virgin things, and left them to starve to death, a particularly cruel end since there was plenty of water to prolong their agony.

After taking in these very important sites, we decided to go see the Bocca della Verita, of Roman Holiday fame. Armed with our trusty maps we set out on foot to what we thought was the site, a church whose belltower we coudl see in the distance. It was, of course, the wrong church. Once we had established that we decided to walk on to the correct site. It was at this point that we learned a very important lesson: you will always go the wrong direction on a Roman street. Every single time we made a turn it was in the completly opposite direction from where we wanted to be. After about two hours of extremely hot and tiring walking we decided to learn to navigate the bus system. Having by this time given up on seeing the Bocca, we only wanted to get home. Which is when we learned a very important lesson: Roman buses do not work on a circuit=type route. they go from point A to point B and stop at the end. Since our destination was on the beginning of the route, we rode for a long time only to have the bus stop and the driver throw us out. we were finally able to catch another bus back the other way, but we had to retrace the entire route, passing the point we had started at halfway.

We did manage to have a nice dinner at a litte family=type place in our neighborhood that night, which helped put us back in good spirits, which was really nice because we were going to need all of our patience for the next day, which I will call Disaster Day! (see next post)