Coliseum....

after walk we wandered to the Fountains of Trevi, just big, tourist attraction, wow am i jaded or what? the fountains at the end of the aquaducts we had seen on wednesday and friday had been a little cooler though, mainly because of the context - these were more elaborately and less formally sculpted, kind of fun.... then to the real tourist attractions, the Coliseum and Palatine. The coliseum was quite anti-climactic, had a pretty good idea from the outside, and hazaardous tourists were flocking... goo.... amazingly preserved though. would have been nice to know what exactly was old and what was reconstruction... when the Fascists were in charge, they were very much about preserving the ruins and selectively rebuilding parts to give a better idea of the original, not a bad thing but a little distracting to not know. Huge crosses in the Coliseum were rather jarring... a site of martyrdom is not necessarily a good thing....

I thought the Palatine was quite a bit cooler in evoking old-stuff feeling (ha)... the original palace, Palatine was the name of the hill the imperial complex was built into, and the root word for all palaces, palazzos, etc since. pretty cool. a lot of preserved walls, chambers, indecipherable patterns of walls and tunnels and gardens and stadiums - huge complex.

The arches and building blocks still remaining were astounding - the evoked so much cgood architecture of the present day.... and all still standing, 2000 years later... significant amounts of thought on the subject, might get it down someday....