Roma

6 AM kinda actually happened. We ate breakfast at the hotel - it was light and excellent. They had delicious bread, coffee and cereal. Then we embarked on our way to the Colosseum. Interestingly, that is not its real name. While Colosseum actually means roughly "big building," the landmark's actual name is Flavian Ampitheater, named after the Flavian dynasty that made it in 80 AD. We decided to get a guided tour of the Colesseum, Palantine Hill and The Roman Forum. The tour was really informative and worthwhile. Some other stuff I learned - the word arena means sand, not stage. They call the stage "arena" because they used to cover it with sand every few hours to remove all the dirt, blood and sweat (and other things) that resulted from the happenings. Also, the gladiators were not criminals, but good honest men who were trained to fight. There was a whole host of other interesting things we learned from our tour guide.

Then we went on to the Palantine Hill and The Roman Forum. Our tour guide was British, so I got to hear the accent again after a while. The stories about the different emperors were quite fascinating, as was the concept of the 6 Vestial Virgins. We climbed all the way to the top of the hill and got a great panoramic view of the city at the top.

By this time we were all pretty tired. We made our way back to the area near the hotel and found a nice little ristorante to eat lunch at. We had some lasagna, pizza and pesto linguine. We roamed like nomads along a few roads looking at the stalls then headed back. I don't know what happened then, but I do remember waking up approximately 2 hours later to everybody being sound asleep. We planned to go to the Spanish Steps, but decided to keep it for another day when we would already be in that area. Instead we planned for the Vatican (tomorrow) and had dinner at a cute little place. We had two vegetarian pasta dishes and tried some tiramisu that the lady actually made on the spot. It was quite different from the kind we are used to, but delicious all the same.