Roman Holiday

I completely missed writing about Roma while I was there, so I am trying to play catch up.

Rome is amazing. My favorite place has to be the ruins of the Roman Forum, Palantine Hill, and the Colosseum. It is mindboggling how an ancient civilization could be quite so advanced. Apparently, the Romans really liked their ceilings high, and I mean VERY high, so the first floor would be the equivalent to the height of roughly 3 stories in modern times. And the ruins, well, it was scattered with bits of broken and elaborately carved columns, some of the inscriptions still intact. I was hopping from one cracked marble to the next. It is amazing to see all the bits of polished marble here and there and call this a ruin. True, it is not what it used to be, but it does not take much imagination to reconstruct its grandeur. Plus, I do not think that any ruins from our century will look quite as graceful and advanced after 1500 years as this. Also, try to imagine if you will that these ruins have pretty much been picked clean, as the citizens of Rome quarried the marble, gold, and other precious metals that once graced the walls and floors of the Colosseum, and essentially recycled it for more modern projects, especially in the homes of the wealthy, being used as crown molding or other such mundane decoration.