We spent four days just seeing the very top of the huge riches of Rome. The Vatican Museums, the Forum, Colosseum and Palatine Hill. An open topped bus tour. The Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain. Various slices of pizza, several ice-creams, very (very) sore feet. 137 photographs. We're only posting the one picture, of us beside the Arch of Constatntine and the Colosseum, to stand for it all.
Rome requires a different way of seeing. Every building, every sight, every perspective is full of different layers and events, epochal changes over the last three thousand years. So many different forms of government, such an array of art and propaganda. Rome is full of reinvention: the Colosseum built as a demagogic gesture, over the top of Nero's extravagances, now at the end of Mussolini's own imperial gesture of the road that cuts the Forum in two. The Sistine Chapel, painted against the Pope's original commission but famous from the moment of completion. The beautiful statues in the Octagonal Garden of the Vatican, mostly collected in the Renaissance - classical-Roman copies of earlier Greek originals.
We feel we've seen so very little of it; we are already planning our next forays into a city which will become emptier over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we return to the UK for a while, as the coffers need filling. The weather is still splendid here, despite several torrential thunderstorms, and neither of us is looking forward to the short, wet days of the UK in winter.