Colosseum day! We had so far only seen the Colosseum from the outside, so this was the day we would finally check it out inside.
Our hotel was within walking distance from the Colosseum, so that was easy enough. We arrived on site around 12 noon, and by then, the queue had grown. However, we were not too worried about that because I knew an entrance that would take us a mere 15mins to get in instead of 1 - 1½hrs otherwise :o).
So for those who are planning a visit to Rome, take note! Because I am going to tell you where this lesser known entrance is!
Click to see larger image.
The yellow circle is where you should go to get your tickets in a mere 15mins. Not many people know about it, because it is actually the entrance to the Palatino ruins, not the Colosseum. However, the ticket that you buy for the Palatino includes the entrance ticket to the Colosseum for €11! So yeah, now you know. It felt good to be able to walk past the looooooong queue of people when entering the Colosseum, since they could only look on enviously and wonder why we could just skip the queue like a VIP ;o).
Anyway, we would not have known this little "secret" if I hadn't been paying attention to our guide who was with us for the Catacomb tour. So the moral of the story is: ALWAYS pay attention to what your guide tells you!
So first, pictures from inside the Palatino. It's actually quite interesting:
Inside at last!
Checking out that man who was checking me out.
Ruins
You're too big to fit in there, honey bunny!
Ruins are such great places for picteresque shots.
Rome-mantic couple
Btw, did you know that the English word "palace" is actually from the Italian word "Palatino"? Well, now you know.
Time now for the real attraction that we wanted to see - the Colosseum!
Doesn't look like what you thought it looks like, huh? Well, you have to imagine a wooden floor covering over the basement which you see now.
And you have to imagine stepped-seats all around for spectators.
Here's Martin imagining as hard as he could.
The basement where they kept all the animals.
I watched the movie Gladiator starring Russell Crowe for the 1st time after returning from Rome. Man, it was good! But that was what I've been hearing from those who had already watched it, and since it was a Ridley Scott movie, I expected nothing less than excellent from him. It really helps you to see the grandness of the Colosseum in that time, so if you're not good at imagining from the pictures above, then go watch Gladiator. Btw, there was a Danish actress (Connie Nielsen in a lead role) and Danish actor (minor role) in that movie. Kinda cool.
Ok, ok...if you haven't watched Gladiator yet and are either too lazy to do so or it's not your kind of movie, and you lack imagination, then you can watch this Pepsi commercial instead:
Happy now?
We had a dinner cruise booked later that evening at 21:00hrs, so we had decided to return to our hotel and relax till it was time to head to the pier. Martin really has me to thank for an exciting life because as usual, I was pushing the limits of time to get to our destination ;o). I mean, even though we were in Italy, where time was as flexible as as a rubber band, he was still running on Danish clock-work.
So we did have to run quite a bit to the metro, then once we got off the metro, we had to run a bit more to the river before we were able to see that time would not run out on us after all.
The dinner cruise was ok, I guess. I was actually expecting something way more grand, and at least tiramisu for dessert, but no...it was nothing really spectacular. Not for the price, at least. Oh well, that was our belated romantic Christmas dinner, so better than nothing.
Made it on time!
Full after a 4-course meal.
Interesting Christmas deco - Glitter Belt!
Thus ends our day... . Well, almost. We wanted to take the metro back to our hotel since we were far from walking distance to it, but it turned out that even though it was only 23:30hrs on a freakin' Friday night, the metro had already closed for business! So guess what? We had to WALK all the way back, and that took around 40mins! Oh well...like I said in a previous post, we just couldn't get enough of walking...it seemed.
