Friday, July 4th: Rome

Friday, July 4th
Rome

We woke up early Friday as we had a private tour scheduled of a few sites in Rome. Waiting for us in the lobby of our hotel was Dennis, our tour guide.  Our tour was mainly to see the Forum, Colosseum, and Palatine Hill so we left our hotel and started walking in that direction. Dennis did a great job of explaining the area we were staying in as well as interesting pieces of information about Rome as a whole. We took a lot of pictures in the Colosseum since that was the best part of the tour.

Here's our top 5 cool pieces of info:

1: Back in the day, Rome was known to have many fires and floods. The floods would bring in a ton of debris and the fires would create mounds of burnt houses, buildings, etc... instead of removing the debris, the Romans just built on top of the debris, creating many layers of Rome. Today it is very easy to see where the original floor was vs where the floors are today (much higher).
2: All of the historical artifacts were buried underground until around 1800. At this time, Naples had uncovered Pompeii and they were receiving many accolades. The leader of Rome decided to follow suit and start excavating all around the city. This is when the Forum and many other famous sites were uncovered. More than half of the Forum is still uncovered as a main street runs over it. One of the biggest problems in Rome is traffic so they won't be able to close down the street to excavate any further.
3: Roman numerals: 5 is V because when you put up all 5 fingers, your pinky and thumb make a V. 10 is X but is actually 2 V's, one right side up, one upside down.
4: All roads lead to Rome: one of the leaders built a statue in Palatine Hill and from that statue they measured the kilometers to all of the other major cities in the world. This is where the saying all roads lead to Rome comes from.
5: Gladiator Movie Info: In the movie, when the emperor gave the thumbs up thumbs down on whether to kill someone, he gave a thumbs up to spare the life and thumbs down to kill him. In real life they would give a thumbs up to kill and send up to heaven or thumbs down to spare and stay down on earth.

After the tour we went to the Jewish Ghetto and had some lunch and saw the synagogue. The synagogue was beautiful and the fried artichoke we had was awesome.

We were both pretty tired so we went back to our hotel and got a quick nap in before the night. We got ready and went to some Irish pub to watch the world cup match between Germany and France. After the game, we had no plans for dinner but ended up walking to a street in the Monti area filled with cute restaurants and boutique stores. We picked a restaurant and had a nice casual meal. After dinner it was back to the hotel to get ready for the next day of shopping and picnicing.

Matt & (Shayna)