Day 40 Rome:

Today we are going on a tour through the Colosseum. We are pretty excited about this one so we decide to get up, have breakfast and get moving around 10ish. The tour is at 1pm and we have managed to get tickets for the underground section and up to the top level. This has only been open for the last year or so and it is only open for 6 months of the year. Places are hard to get so we feel very fortunate. We decide to walk down and take a look at some of the ruins along the way. The ruins are amazing but it can also be hard to stay attentive because you are always forced to look at bits of rubble and then try to imagine what was there. We grab a snack before going in and grabbing our tickets. The guide rocks up and we get moving. We are taken over the reconstructed section of the arena. This is a small section at one end of the Colosseum to try and give visitors an idea of what the arena looked like. A standard ticket to the Colosseum doesn’t allow you to walk on this section, even though we were only allowed on a small roped off area and we were not allowed to stop, it was worth extra dough. We head down underneath the arena level to where the gladiators and animals would have entered from. Even though the Colosseum was built back in 80 AD it’s still in pretty good shape. You get a good feel for what this place would have been like back then. They had some amazing engineering in this place. Something like 80 lifts were used to raise the gladiators and animals through trap doors in all different areas into the arena level. We continue on and back they way we came in and head around the “standard ticket” route before taking the stairs up to level 3, the upper level. From here you can get a real feel for what the atmosphere would have been like, more so than from the lower levels. It’s fantastic because it is only a small group of people and we have plenty of time and space to look around and take some snaps. This is rare in Rome as you will normally be sharing your immediate sq/m with about 600 other tourists and locals. The tour ends around 3pm and we take some more time to look around at the lower levels before heading out around 4pm. This was a real highlight and we would recommend that if anyone was going to do visit the Colosseum that they do this tour. We head back to the apartment and rest up before heading back to the restaurant we ate at last night, the Wine and Grill restaurant. As we were leaving last night I saw a couple order the chateaubriand for 2 and the waiter brought it to the table to ask them if it had been cooked to their satisfaction before moving to another table to carve it up. He then presented their plates to them complete with grilled vegies and this thing looked awesome. So I said to Kris we had to come back because I wanted that!! So it ends up being another magnificent meal and we leave shaking everyone’s hands again. On the same road is as the restaurant is “go to” gelato guy, Valentino, so we pop in for ice cream again before continuing on and back to the apartment.

Due to the internet connection at this apartment being ridiculously slow I am having a hard time uploading photos, so rather staying up till 1am like last night trying to get it to work I have opted for sleep instead.