I’m going to break the time spent in Italy into parts. We were there for 3 days and the first day (actually, everyday) was jam packed.

We arrived in Rome late night Sunday and we luckily had the foresight when planning to get a hotel near the airport. In fact, our hotel was at the airport. When we landed, all we had to do was pick up our luggage and walk through a long terminal that ended at the footsteps of our Hilton. It was so convenient and after a day of 13.1 miles, a 2 hour flight, and jet lag we much appreciated this convenience.

Our intentions were to wake up early and take the hotel’s shuttle to downtown Rome but we were SO tired we slept in til around 10ish.

We got to Rome’s city center around noon and the shuttle dropped us off right in the middle of all good stuff with the Colosseum and Pantheon within walking distance.

In fact, when we got off the shuttle the first thing we “saw” was the Colosseum. Or so we thought. Now, remember that we’ve never seen it in person. All we had to go by was history books and the movie Gladiator. We stood looking up at this building (large, but definitely the massiveness that we expected) severely disappointed. This was it?? There’s no way! We could hear other tourists around us asking each other the same thing.

Then the driver, who spoke broken English, said, “No. This not Colosseum. This is theatre.”

Whew!! For a second there we had had our spirits broken. Ben and I laughed at ourselves and took pictures in front of what we then dubbed the faux-losseum. Jaja!!!

There was a small restaurant close by where we decided to get lunch and yeah, it was pretty amazing 🙂 I had lasagna and Ben had a pizza with a whole bunch of stuff on it. Amazing.

Then….I HAD GELATO!!! I took some to go as we got our sight seeing started. It was seriously amazing and I ended up eating gelato like 3 times everyday that we were there.

We decided that our first stop would be the Pantheon which was closest to where we were at. Along the way, we saw this:

Yes, the guy is holding up the other guy with just that stick!! And, his arm wasn’t shaking AT ALL. The guy on top was super still too! The whole thing was just crazy.

Finally, we reached the Pantheon.

I’m not a huge history buff but I did know this was a must see.

We hung out for a bit then continued onward. Next stop, the real Colosseum.

On our way there, we swung by a church (and there were quite a few of them!).

 

We kept at it reaching our final destination.

They had this poster on a wall near the Colosseum:

And this is the real thing:

At the top of each entry way was a number. So back in the day, when people would look for their seats they’d know which “section” to go to. Cool, huh?

We decided not to pay to go inside the Colosseum. It was pretty expensive and we had a pretty good view of the inside from the outside looking in. We were okay with just that 🙂

On our way back to our meeting spot for hotel shuttle pick-up, we swung by another church. This one was huuuge!

And then the inside:

We took a ton of pictures of this church. There was so much to look at!

When we left, we headed back to the location of the faux-losseum for our ride back to the hotel–not before getting lost of course!! Lol!

We finally made it and on our way, took a pit stop here:

Around 7 o’clock and 8-10 miles later we were back in our room completely exhausted. We knew had a busy day ahead of us so we wanted to get a good night’s sleep.

Next stop: Florence and Pisa!!

If you missed my Spain re-cap and/or my Rock n Roll Madrid 1/2 Marathon recap, here ya go!

Hope you all had a good weekend and have a happy Monday!

–What was your weekend like? Total miles? (28 for me)

–Have you seen the movie Gladiator?