We had both been to Rome many years ago, but were looking forward to seeing it about 37 years later.  Phyllis commented that she would be interested to look at her old photos from 1976 when we get home, just to see the changes.  Thus we set out to devise a plan and eventually determined to take the metro to the Colosseum/Forum area and then walk back to the train station, taking in such “Rome in a day” sights as we could find along the way.   We started this journey by standing in a long line at the only working ticket machine for the metro that we saw in the Termini.  It was apparently composed entirely of ignorant tourists since once we got our ticket and went down a flight of stairs and around a corner we saw a number of working machines standing lonely and unused.

Some things never change in the Eternal City, and crowds in the Colosseum and Roman Forum are apparently among them.  It was a very chilly, brisk day, and threatened rain off and on (and rained a bit too) but that did not deter the crowds.  Still it was probably better than it would have been on a beautiful spring or summer day.  In any event, we were impressed all over again by the scale and quality of all these Roman monuments.  Phyllis commented that time travel would be so wonderful, to show up in the Colosseum during a spectacle, to which Craig observed that it depends on whether you are transported to the stands or out in the middle of the arena floor.  True enough.

We walked from about 10:00 in the morning until returning to the hotel at 5:00 to pick up our luggage and head out to the airport for our evening flight.  In the meantime, we wandered from the Forum to the Palatine Hill to the Colosseum to the Pantheon to the Trevi Fountain and then all the way back to the train station.  Early in this journey we noticed in a write up that there were thirteen ancient obelisks in Rome.  Apparently eight are Egyptian and five are Roman.  Since our trip to Egypt we have been fascinated by obelisks, however, they are widely scattered in Rome and we were unable to decipher the location descriptions sufficiently to develop any plan to see them.  However, it turned out that just keeping an eye out (and occasionally taking a wrong turn and getting lost) allowed us to accidentally run into several and before the day was out we had visited four. 

During this journey our only break was to buy the obligatory gelato for lunch and sit on a wall while eating it.  The gelato was good, but we probably should have checked the wall for grease stains before we sat down.  It was a long day and rather exhausting, but was just what we wanted.  And Phyllis at least was able to doze on the 2-1/2 hour flight to Istanbul.  We arrived at 1:00 a.m. local time and got to the hotel about 2:30.  Keyed up by the day’s activity and by being in Istanbul, we finally got to sleep about 4:00 a.m.  Neither of us heard the 5:00 a.m. call to prayer.