Coliseum and the Roman Forum

March 4:

I slept better last night then I had the night before. Too well actually. I put in ear plugs to protect myself from potential rabble and completely slept through my 10am alarm. Pat turned my alarm of after 15 minutes and after an unsuccessful attempt to shake me awake went for breakfast. When the staff asked him if he wanted breakfast for one or two he stuck his head in to the room to ask me if I was going to come to breakfast and this was somehow enough to bring me to my senses. Moments after he closed the door I was awake and startled by the nearness of the end of breakfast I rushed out to grab some while I still could. We had planned to get to the Vatican that day but it was too nice out to be inside all day and the rest of the week looked much less nice out so we decided that the coliseum was the thing to do that day. We left our hostel by foot after our meal and headed to the coliseum. It is really impressive.

We couldn’t see where you got tickets for it so we headed around to the Roman Forum, adjacent to the Coliseum and found a ticket office for the joint ticket to both ruins. Fortunately today I did bring my camera.

After a thorough walk through them both, we were getting hungry and decider to get lunch. Not knowing a good place we meandered northwards until we found a nice place to get pasta called Osteria da Mario.

 I had spaghetti with a spicy tomato sauce and crispy thick pig cheek bacon. It was amazing. After lunch we wandered around a bit more purposefully, seeing the Pantheon(inside and out), Piazza Navona, and the Trevi Fountain.

After seeing the sights we were ready to take the metro home. Once at the hostel we took a much-needed rest. After a while we got going and figured out our plans for after Rome. We decided to book 2 nights in Naples using one day to explore Naples and the second to walk around Pompeii. With the La Contora hostel booked for the nights of the sixth and seventh we headed out to a grocery store to buy some wine and sandwich making supplies. Once we got back to hostel we ate and chilled until it was time to catch some shut eye.