The next morning was rather rough. You would expect, me having walked everywhere, that my feet and legs would be sore and blistered. Well this was never the case. However, I did do a number on both my Achilles tendons. However, I felt more like Hector, after Achilles pierced leather thongs through his ankles and dragged him around Troy behind his chariot. Well it wasn’t that bad, but it took a while to loosen them up so that walking was no longer a chore. I wasn’t slowed down much in the long run. On the way out I went by the Colosseum once again and noticed one of the many stray cats that frequent the city sites.
Anyway, Day 3 was a gorgeous day, so I decided to hop on a train to Ostia, the ancient seaport of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber. However, 2000 years of sediment buildup covered the abandoned city, preserving much of it, and locating it a mile inland from the modern seacoast. As the first colony of Rome, the city is planned out like a military camp, with a main road called the Decumanus Maximus.
Ostia Antica is very extensive, but mostly the first floors of buildings remain. However, there were all the essentials of a Roman city: apartment blocks, temples of the gods, public baths, and military barracks. In addition, the city had a stone theater where the comedies of Plautus and Terrence must have been staged.
As Rome’s seaport, Ostia was full of grain merchants’ and sailors’ guilds. This fact is reflected in the myriad mosaics that pave the city’s floors. They even had a lighthouse modeled after the Pharos of Alexandria.
After several hours exploring Ostia, I hopped on the train back to Rome and trekked to the Forum Boarium where I gazed on the temples of Hercules and Portunus while enjoying a typical lunch of pizza and Italian beer. Not bad.
Thence I made my way into the heart of modern Rome, and found myself on the Via del Corso, which is Rome’s equivalent of the Champs Elysee, a crowded vista all the way from the Vittoriano to the Piazza del Popolo. Along the way, I ducked off the trail to check out more antiquities, such as the Column of Marcus Aurelius in the aptly named Piazza Colonna. I was rather indignant at learning from the Latin inscription below the column that a pope had replaced the statue of Aeneas atop the column with one of St. Paul. The rechristening of pagan monuments and adorning them with crosses and saints is a common theme throughout Rome: the cost of preserving the ancient past.
I managed by sunset to get to the Spanish Steps while there was still sunlight, and from the top watched the sun go down over the beautiful city.
Getting dark I made my last notable stop at the Trevi Fountain, which I now believe is the greatest example of Baroque fountain sculpture in the world, especially when it’s lit up at night.
It was about this time I did my souvenir shopping. Having already been in Prague, I wasn’t surprised to see that the thousands of gift shops throughout the city were all the same, selling the same tacky merchandise. My father joked that he wanted a Colosseum snowglobe. Every gift shop had them, so I bought one to follow through on the jest. For my nephew I bought a t-shirt featuring Asterix & Obelix, and for my girlfriend I finally found a shop that was selling something different, Murano glass jewelry. I bought her a royal blue heart pendant necklace. She loves it.
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