Touring the Colosseum
May. 25th, 2025 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerItaly Travelog #7
Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 12:30pm
In planning our visit to the Colosseum today we debated whether to hire a tour guide. Generally we like to get around by our own wits— see also, walking and taking the subway to the Colosseum this morning. Though it's not so much that we dislike tour guides as we hate tour groups. We hate seeing/hearing just the least-common-denominator stuff and having to move as slow as the slowest group member— which, in our experience, is often a person who can barely walk and wants to stop for smoke breaks and/or gift shopping frequently. But when we were investigating how to visit the Colosseum on our own we found that it would take a lot of planning effort and still likely entail waiting in long lines when we got here— two other things that we also hate. So we booked a guided tour, a private guided tour, for a few hundred dollars.
Our guide started us out with a history of the Colosseum. It was basically an R-rated soap opera of ancient times. It was a string of one emperor who murdered another, whose mother murdered all his rivals, who then murdered his mother to consolidate power, who then was murdered by rivals without his murderous mother to protect him, et cetera.
"I'm really not interested in who murdered whom," I said with a bit of a snarky tone in my voice. I mean, it's hard not to be snarky when saying those particular words! "I'd like to spend time seeing the architecture of the Colosseum."
That's one of the nice things about private tours: you can customize them to your liking. Our guide shifted from dwelling on ancient incest and murder to taking us around the whole mezzanine level of the Colosseum and the ground level, too.
One bit of history I do remember from amid the saga of who-killed-whom was that the Colosseum was built starting in 69 CE. It took 8 years, the guide told us. "That's a long time."
"That's nothing," I shot back. "In San Francisco, where we're from, it took the city 4 years just to build a few toilets."
And to raise money— and labor— to build the Colosseum in those 4 years, the Roman Empire went out and sacked Jerusalem. They scraped out a lot of the treasure and took Jews slaves. "Wow," I quipped, "It's like some Roman architect saw the pyramids in Egypt and said, 'We've got to hire— I mean, enslave— their construction crew!'"
Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 12:30pm
In planning our visit to the Colosseum today we debated whether to hire a tour guide. Generally we like to get around by our own wits— see also, walking and taking the subway to the Colosseum this morning. Though it's not so much that we dislike tour guides as we hate tour groups. We hate seeing/hearing just the least-common-denominator stuff and having to move as slow as the slowest group member— which, in our experience, is often a person who can barely walk and wants to stop for smoke breaks and/or gift shopping frequently. But when we were investigating how to visit the Colosseum on our own we found that it would take a lot of planning effort and still likely entail waiting in long lines when we got here— two other things that we also hate. So we booked a guided tour, a private guided tour, for a few hundred dollars.
Our guide started us out with a history of the Colosseum. It was basically an R-rated soap opera of ancient times. It was a string of one emperor who murdered another, whose mother murdered all his rivals, who then murdered his mother to consolidate power, who then was murdered by rivals without his murderous mother to protect him, et cetera.
"I'm really not interested in who murdered whom," I said with a bit of a snarky tone in my voice. I mean, it's hard not to be snarky when saying those particular words! "I'd like to spend time seeing the architecture of the Colosseum."
That's one of the nice things about private tours: you can customize them to your liking. Our guide shifted from dwelling on ancient incest and murder to taking us around the whole mezzanine level of the Colosseum and the ground level, too.
One bit of history I do remember from amid the saga of who-killed-whom was that the Colosseum was built starting in 69 CE. It took 8 years, the guide told us. "That's a long time."
"That's nothing," I shot back. "In San Francisco, where we're from, it took the city 4 years just to build a few toilets."
And to raise money— and labor— to build the Colosseum in those 4 years, the Roman Empire went out and sacked Jerusalem. They scraped out a lot of the treasure and took Jews slaves. "Wow," I quipped, "It's like some Roman architect saw the pyramids in Egypt and said, 'We've got to hire— I mean, enslave— their construction crew!'"
