First days in Rome

Spring in Rome is lovely.  Everywhere you walk, vines cover buildings, trees are bursting into bloom, and wisteria is tumbling over walls.

 

In a garden near my apartment the scent of orange blossom is so heavy you can almost taste it.  The garden is steps away from the Colle Oppio park, which leads down to the Colosseum, and this park is a meeting place for the neighbourhood - kids, dogs, old people, students, family groups.  No matter what time of the day, there's always people sitting on the park benches, or lazing on the grass.  A little further on the great bulk of the Colosseum looms up, still half covered in scaffolding from a three-year restoration.  In fact, a lot of buildings in Rome are under repair at the moment, with screens shrouding their travertine facades. 

 

Yesterday I met my conversation exchange buddy for a trip down to the Roman houses and amphitheatre lying under the modern day buildings of the via Botteghe Oscure.  At one time, the Crypta Balbi lay within metres of Pompey's Theatre, with the colonnaded Cryptus - a huge covered arcade - annexed to the theatre that Cornelius Balbus built in 13BC.  Today you can descend into a Roman street, following the line of the old structure with the massive outer wall of the theatre still in place, and in fact providing very solid support for the jumble of successive buildings right up to today's modern museum sitting on top of it all.

 

Three years on, I am still meeting and talking with the same people I met and exchanged my basic Italian for their (considerably better) English.  It's incredibly satisfying to now have long and fairly easy conversations, the best reinforcement of how far my language has come.  Of course I am still making stupid mistakes, and often repeating the same basic errors, but on the whole I can now speak Italian :)

 

After a long day of exploring the structures of the amphitheatre, I walked back to my apartment in Monti, past the giant "typewriter" - the Vittorio Emanuele monument - passing the forums of both Caesar and Augustus, Trajan's Markets and the massive tufa wall of the Subura, which kept the rich safe from the constant threat of fires from the slums down below.  At 8pm the light was beginning to fade but Rome was busy, busy with people swarming along the via Foro Imperiale.  Almost a perfect day in the city.  Just need to get my aching feet used to the cobblestones again.