ROME ON FOOT

Since this a winter month and days did not many hours of sunlight, I decided to tour Rome on foot during the day and take some conducted tour in the evening. When I was planning for my Italy trip while in New York, whoever I spoke to told me to keep at least two or three days for Rome and that it was easy to tour the city by foot. So I started my journey and first reached the Colosseum by train. As I came out of the station saw this huge circular structure which is the landmark of Rome. I decided to take an audio tour which told me all details about the history, the architectural details, the bloody and ruthless sport of gladiators. Hearing the audio made the whole place come to life.

I could see the Arch of Constantine from the second floor of Colosseum and continued on the track to the Roman Forum and Palastine Hills. Thankfully I had the travel guide book with me so I kept referring to it as I stood by each piece of architecture. My book mentioned the top ten things to see in each of the top ten architectures. The walk was hilly and road cobbled with big stones made it hard to walk. There were hardly any arrows and directions. Even the pieces did not have mentioning what they were. On close look I found some scribbling on the stone in Italian e.g. 'Fora Roma' for Roman Forum but still no explanations about the history of that piece. This is where my guidebook came handy.

I also figured that I was going up and down a couple of times on the same route so that I dont miss out any of the pieces of architecture. What would have ideally taken me three hours to cover, I did in five by myself. I walked past the ruins of the Roman Forum area and saw many interesting stone age huts in the hills. My next destination was Museum of Capitaloni the third in my list of top ten which I wanted to cover on Day one. I asked a few people but noone seemed to know. I sat down with the map figured out on which road I was and where to go. Saw the imposing huge marble monument of Vittorio on the way and finally reached the museum.

I had already booked a 'Rome by night and dinner' tour so rushed back to the hotel by evening which is around five. Crashed on the bed for a short nap of half an hour and was fresh and excited for the tour. I realised that three days in Rome were too less to walk around on my own if I wanted to immerse in the history of the place and not just touch the major monuments artificially. So I decided to take a tour early morning and evening for the rest of two days. Early morning would make me start early and evening was unsafe alone. That left me with the afternoons to explore on my own.