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| The Colosseum |
Saturday, was simple and already laid out. Today was the day
for the Colosseum and the Forum. Before hand, the thought of these two familiar images brought about a palpable sense of the blasé and the familiar, but any sense of this was quickly knocked clean out the window as soon as we set foot in the grounds of the Forum. A sprawling, vast collection of ancient ruins, churches, huge arches commemorating a multitude of Emperors and battles. So much history, so much wonderful architecture, so much presence. Even with the hordes of fellow, camera snapping tourists buzzing around it is simply awe-inspiring. Again, imaginations can easily rebuild, resculpt the buildings that lie in ruins, you can imagine the senate conducting its political business. And it was free to get in!
And then to the Colosseum. I tried to expunge all thoughts of Russell Crowe in a short leather trimmed skirt from my mind as we walked up the Via dei Fori Imperiali and the huge structure loomed, domineering over the immediate sky line. Again, for such an apparently familiar image, words cannot do it justice. Once in the Piazza del Collosseo, having past the ubiquitous fake handbag salesman and burly men in Roman Centurion uniforms, we were snapped out of out awe-struck silence by somebody asking in perfect English if we would like a guided tour of the Colosseum.
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| Inside the Colosseum |
Usually I would either walk in the opposite direction or just ignore anybody offering guided tours of anything, but on this occasion, i.e. when I saw the queue of non-guided tourists, I was convinced. For 32 Euros each, we got to queue jump without being verbally abused by all and sundry and we got to listen to the informative and interesting ramblings of a small, white haired South African man in a beige Safari jacket. As soon as we stepped out from inside the huge, stone blocked corridors that would have passed as the corridors for the high and mighty, out through the Emperors entrance and into the main concourse, I was spell bound. Seeing a 2,000 year old stadium that catered for 70,000 of Rome’s finest as they watched all manner of organised barbarism was something else. The Colosseum, to me, was always one of those places that you’d see in films and on the television and now, here I was, standing there and listening to small South African talking about men and giraffes alike being butchered under the stage after they had died in the name of mass entertainment. Surely it’s only a matter of time before Channel 5 re-consider using this for primetime TV?
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