Saturday - ancient neighborhood

Today was more a neighborhood tour.  Our guide, Francesca, was excellent.  

We went to a church very close to us, San Clemente, What was especially cool with this church is that they have dug underneath to discover ancient ruins.  So we went down two levels to see how things were before. 

We then walked to the Colosseum.  Wow.  You do not really get the sense of scale until you are actually here.  Francesca was really able to help up feel what it might likely to have been like.  Back in those days Rome was about power, permanence and functionality.  Greece was about thought, art and action.

They have done some reconstruction to show how this might have been, with the floor.

The Colosseum was donated to the church because of all the martyred Christians.  Come to find out there were actually very few Christians killed here.  Oh well.

A look across to one of the many arches. 

A view towards the forum.

It was fun taking picture of the flowers amid the ruins.

There was a lot of scaffolding up at different locations.  I guess they are always working on restoring or digging.  We walked to the forum and we were again struck by the sense of power.  

We concluded our official tour here in the forum.  Rome is a museum.  Every where you look there are signs of the ancient.  Two quotes that Francesca used: "The more you know, the more you see" and "The more you look to the past the more you can see to the future"  I don't know who the first quote was from but the second is Churchill.