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| Frank at the bus terminal at the airport waiting for the bus that would take us into Rome. |
Rome has special significance for us. Both my husband and I are students of history and for all our lives have read and learned about the Roman Empire. It is amazing to me that you can go through 50 years of your life and read so many books and histories about one place and never see it. And then when after all those years, you do finally see it, it is like a miracle. As a child I had my first encounter with Romans in movies. I remember one I saw in the 60's about Romulus and Remus. I also watched The Robe, Quo Vadis, I Claudius and Ben Hur several times, and these movies planted the seeds of fascination of not only things Roman, but things ancient. I suppose Technicolor and British actors can have that effect on people.
My passion for things Roman increased greatly in high school when I took Latin. I loved that class! While declining nouns, conjugating verbs, learning verb tenses, and parts of speech, I actually learned English grammar. The vocabulary I studied stuck with me enough to ease my way through my year of college French. I went on to read several histories and fictional books about ancient Rome.
Sometime in 2010, Frank and I discovered Michael Duncan's podcast, History of Rome 101 and were instantly hooked. We listened faithfully from Rome's legendary founding by Romulus all the way to it's ignoble and protracted death in the fifth century. We liked the podcast so much, we are actually listening to it for the second time.
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| Not a nice guy in the Ben Hur story, but Stephen Boyd made good eye-candy in his military tribune's uniform. |
Our first Mediterranean cruise two years ago stopped in Civitavecchia. We boarded a bus and toured the Vatican and the Colosseum. We saw brief glimpses of the Forum and the Aurelian wall from the bus window as we whizzed by on our way to the Colosseum. It was too frustrating that our brief stay in Rome gave us so little time. My husband and I promised each other that we would return and for a longer time.
The next year Frank and I returned to take another cruise out of Civitavecchia and stayed a few days in Rome before the cruise. On our first day, we took a self-guided tour of Ostia Antica and the next day a tour to Tivoli to see Hadrian's Villa. On the third day, we saw the Colosseum again and for the first time toured the Roman Forum. It was a much better tour and on our cruise we were destined to see many more Roman ruins in Ephesus. It is amazing how common-place they are all over the Mediterranean.
In March, we returned to Rome for yet another Mediterranean cruise out of Civitavecchia. The two days we spent in Rome prior to that cruise were the best ever. Through two extensive, excellent tours offered by Dark Rome, I got to see more of Rome than I ever did before and came away with a much clearer prospective of the geography and the history. Once again we saw the Colosseum and Forum, but this time we added the Capitoline Hill and the Capitoline museum. The Capitoline museum was set up more like American museums with plenty of captions that made a self-guided tour much easier to accomplish than the Vatican museum. The previous year we hurried through the Vatican museum with a tour guide and saw the highlights, but the large crowds made viewing difficult.
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| The Temple of Hadrian. A perfectly intact Roman facade. |
Rome is a multi-layered city. While admiring and marveling over the Roman Ruins, one cannot neglect the beauty and majesty of the Renaissance and the magnificent stories of artists and their patron popes. One of the most amazing revelations was that so much of the grandeur and beauty of the ancient buildings was stripped away over time to build St. Peter's Basilica and the palaces of the popes. So much of the marble that graces the exhibits in the Vatican had first graced the exteriors of Roman public buildings.
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Fountain of the Four Rivers. Highlights the splendor
of the Italian Renaissance.
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There is still much of Rome I haven't seen and there are things I must see again in order to plant them firmly in my mind. Our third trip to Rome was the best ever, but each time brings a new familiarity and ease in negotiating our way around the city. Every time we visit, we build on prior knowledge and come away with even greater appreciation.
In conclusion I am thankful for the history I had about ancient Rome and history in general starting in grade school. The Romans seemed majestic to me, but as I learned more about them, I was forced to acknowledge their dark side as well as their accomplishments. In ancient Rome slavery was rampant and for most of their history, social mobility was rare if not impossible for most people. These were a people who feasted on blood sport and who exploited the wealth in every land they conquered. On the other hand, Romans had a sense of justice that led to a society with laws and the concept of fair play. At times they could be enormously tolerant of other cultures and religions. They were magnificent engineers and though they were not the best at innovation, they improved on almost every technology they utilized.
Though Rome for much of its history was a pagan society and had values very different from the ones I grew up with, their society was much like ours. I find to my chagrin that so many young people know little or nothing about the ancient Romans. By knowing their history and the course of events that drew it, we are better able as a society not to repeat the mistakes that led to their demise. Perhaps by taking their story to heart, western societies might not feel the need to throw away their democratic republics for the tyranny of dictators and oligarchs. We will be careful not to keep powerful professional armies and we will not give into the temptation to cultivate a permanent lower class we exploit and manipulate with bread and circuses.
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| View of Trajan's Forum from the window of the Capitoline Museum. |
