Rome: The Colosseum, the Forum and a Rainbow at Dinner

Another day we never got round to writing up. We landed in Rome on the Sunday and sailed on the Tuesday, so the Monday in between was our only full day — and it went unblogged for twelve years. There turned out to be fifty-nine photographs of it. The camera’s clock was still set to Washington time, six hours behind, which made reassembling the day a small puzzle; but the phone knew where it was, and between the two of them it all came back.

We had arrived the day before and written about it at the time, in Roma we made it! This is the day after. One day, on foot, in the middle of July, with a ship to catch on Tuesday morning.

Down into the Metro

Rome in July is not a city you cross on foot at midday if you can help it, so we went underground. Line B, four stops, and you come back up the escalator at Colosseo and the thing is simply standing there in front of you, close enough to touch. Nobody warns you about that. It is the best piece of stage management in the city.

Jen on a Rome Metro platform, a straw hat in her hand and passengers waiting along the tiled wall — Eleven o’clock, and already the coolest place in Rome.

The Colosseum

We were inside by half past eleven. The outside of the Colosseum you already know from a hundred photographs; the inside is the part that is genuinely strange, because there is no floor. Two thirds of the arena has been taken away, and what you are looking down into is the hypogeum — the brick warren of passages and lift shafts underneath, where the animals and the machinery waited. It looks less like a stadium than like the engine room of one.

The exposed brick chambers of the Colosseum hypogeum with the reconstructed section of arena floor beyond — No floor. The bit they have put back is at the far end.

The hats came out here and did not go away again for the rest of the day.

Chris in a white bucket hat and Jen in orange, the Colosseum tiers rising behind them

Our favourite photograph of the whole day was taken from inside, looking out. There is a point on the upper level where a tall arched opening lines up almost exactly with the Arch of Constantine outside, so you get one enormous Roman thing neatly framed inside another.

The Arch of Constantine framed through a tall arched opening in the Colosseum wall

The Colosseum outer arcades seen from the street, crowds gathered along the railings

Up on the Palatine

One ticket covers the Colosseum, the Palatine and the Forum, which is the single most useful thing anybody told us about Rome. Ten minutes after leaving the Colosseum we were on top of the Palatine hill and there was almost nobody there. The emperors lived up here for three hundred years and the best-preserved thing they left is a sunken oval garden the size of a running track, walled on all four sides, which everyone calls the Stadium of Domitian and nobody is entirely sure what it was for.

The sunken green oval of the Stadium of Domitian on the Palatine, brick walls on all four sides

Umbrella pines along a gravel terrace on the Palatine with ruined brick walls beside them — Umbrella pines, which are the second-best thing about Rome after the Metro.

The museum on the hill was shut. There is a notice on the fence giving the dates, and they cover the entire summer, which we thought was a bold scheduling decision for a site that gets its visitors in July.

A closure notice posted on the fence outside the Palatine museum, cypresses standing behind

Down into the Forum

You come down off the Palatine at the Arch of Titus, which is the small one, the plain one, and the one worth stopping at. It was put up to celebrate the sack of Jerusalem, and carved on the inside of the arch is a procession carrying the menorah out of the Temple. You walk under it in about four seconds.

The Arch of Titus standing above the Forum, its inscription running across the attic

And then the Forum itself, which takes a while to make sense of, because for the first ten minutes it is a field of broken marble with a lot of people walking through it. Then you start picking out individual buildings and it turns into one of the great places on earth.

The Roman Forum looking towards the Capitoline, broken walls and grass with the city rising beyond

Two things stopped us. The first was a pair of bronze doors, green with age, still hanging in their original frame and still working after seventeen centuries. They belong to the round building usually called the Temple of Romulus, and they are the oldest doors we have ever stood in front of.

The green bronze doors of the Temple of Romulus set between two porphyry columns

The second was the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, where a church was built straight into the middle of a Roman temple, so the columns are pagan and everything above the doorway is baroque. Rome does this constantly and never seems to think it needs explaining.

Jen on the steps below the columns of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina

The Arch of Septimius Severus seen from beneath, its three openings and carved panels overhead — The Arch of Septimius Severus, at the far end.

Out the other end

You leave the Forum and walk straight into the Vittoriano, which is enormous, white, and about eighteen centuries younger than everything you have just been looking at. Romans are famously rude about it. We liked it. It is impossible not to photograph.

The white marble front of the Vittoriano with the Italian flag flying beside a bronze chariot group

Fifteen minutes later, in a side street north of Piazza Venezia, Jen found the car she had come to Italy to find.

Jen beside a white Fiat 500 parked on a cobbled Rome street, a blue car behind it

There is then a two-hour hole in the afternoon that the photographs do not explain. Whatever we did, we came out of it at a quarter to four somewhere very crowded, took two pictures consisting entirely of other people’s heads, and arrived in Piazza Navona at four.

Piazza Navona looking down the long oval, the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone and the obelisk beyond — Piazza Navona is that shape because it is a stadium — the buildings stand on the seating of Domitian’s, and the piazza is the track. Which means that by four o’clock we had been inside two of Domitian’s stadiums in one afternoon, the other being the sunken oval up on the Palatine. He built a lot of them.

Dinner at the top of the Spanish Steps

We had booked somewhere high, which turned out to be the best decision of the trip. At eight the clouds that had been building all afternoon finally did something, and a rainbow came out over the whole city.

A rainbow over the Rome rooftops seen from a terrace, cloud building behind the domes

A bottle of wine on a table against the terrace ironwork, Rome's rooftops and a pink sky beyond

Then the sky went pink, and we ate very slowly for three hours: prawns and calamari to start, steak and small roast potatoes after, and a great deal of red wine while Rome put its lights on underneath us.

A steak with small roast potatoes, bread in a basket and a glass of red wine on a white cloth

We only worked out where we had been when we went back through the photographs twelve years later and read the napkin. It says Hassler Roma. So that is the hotel at the very top of the Spanish Steps, and if you are ever in Rome with one evening and a reason to spend money, that is where to spend it.

A cocktail on a paper coaster printed Hassler Roma, on a glass table in a blue-lit bar — Eleven o’clock, and the evidence.

What we’d tell you

One ticket covers the Colosseum, the Palatine and the Forum. We did all three between half past eleven and ten to two, which is brisk but perfectly comfortable.
Go into the Colosseum first, then the Palatine, then down into the Forum. The Colosseum is the only one of the three that is ever crowded, and the hill above it is nearly empty.
The Metro puts you out at the Colosseum’s front door. In July that is worth more than any other piece of advice on this page.
Hats. There is no shade in the Forum at all.
Check what is open before you climb the Palatine. The museum up there was shut for the whole summer when we went.
Book one dinner somewhere with a roof. Rome is a city that is worth paying to look down on, and the light at eight o’clock does the rest.

Tomorrow, a last morning in Rome and a coach out to the ship: Sail Away Day.