After touring the underground of the Colosseum we went up to the arena portion. They have created a platform that you could walk out on on the arena level. It was pretty cool.

This is some of the marble that they’ve found, it shows a small glimpse of what it would of looked like. The whole Colosseum was covered in marble at one point. A lot of the marble was taken by nobles and used in their own homes. The iron clamps which held the stonework together were pried or hacked out of the walls, leaving numerous pockmarks which still scar the building today.

After the arena you go up the stairs and they have displays of items they have found and illustrations of what the colosseum looked like.

We thought these dice were very interesting. They were made form bone and said to be used in games at the colosseum.

From there you walk back out onto the upper level of the Colosseum. I gotta say at this point we’d seen lot of the Colosseum so we just did a walk around. Didn’t stop and oggle too much just still got a ton of pictures!

Greg took a bunch of pictures of the metal used to keep thsi together, he thought it was fasinating.

The views of Palatine Hill & Roman Forum from this level of the Colosseum was beautiful.

It is said that they used 100,000 of these travertine stones to build the Colosseum. I think this might have been the most mind blowing of it all. How in the world did they get these stones up there?  They were HUGE.

After the Colosseum we walked over to Palatine Hill. We only had 1 hour 30 mins before it closed so we were on a hurry to see it all. This part felt a bit like the Hobbit.

This was a beautiful fountain and fish pond on this large building, we walked up to the top of it and there were beautiful gardens. – The Farnese Garden.

These water spouts are all over Italy, the water is clean and drinkable. We made sure to fill up our water bottles when we were near one.

After Palatine Hill we made our way down to the Roman Forum. It is a plaza of Roman ruins.

This is the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. We all thought this was a cool looking building and each took a picture of it. I loved seeing all of our perspectives on it.

This is Greg’s picture:

This is Jayse’s picture:

This is one of my pictures:

And this is Jaelee’s picture:

When they closed the Forum and were telling everyone to leave we headed out. Just outside the Colosseum a street artist was selling watercolor paintings he’d made of the Colosseum and Rome. I love buying local art and got a really nice picture he did of the Colosseum.

We slowly made our way back to our AirBnb, we found a place to stop and eat. We were just going to get Gelato but they had some yummy looking food on their menu so we ended up eating. Greg and I split a club sandwich, Jaelee got American breakfast and I don’t remember what Jayse ate. Jaelee thought this place had the best meal of the whole trip – she loved the breakfast. Their bacon was delicious – it was thick and crispy. The orange juice was also the best I’ve ever tasted. It was fresh squeezed with no added sugar. It was so good.

After dinner we walked around a few street shops. Jaelee asked to have one of these beret hats. Love these selfies she took after she got one.

This is the square that was blocked off when we first arrived in Rome and learned later that it is Chigi Palace – where the Prime Minster of Rome lives. Luckily it wasn’t closed this night while we were walking back to our AirBnb.