receptionist’s advice of last night, we went into the City by the #8 tram that runs along the Circonvallazione Gianicolense and crosses the Tiber by the Ponte Garibaldi. We got off at the Largo di Torre Argentina, “Square of the Silver Tower” (Argentoratum being the old Roman name for Strasbourg; a Strasbourg-born bishop built a palace with attached tower there in the 16th century. It's still there).We’d wound up at the Largo because it’s the city terminus for #8 trams; but what a discovery
awaited us! Back in the late 1920s, workmen doing demolition uncovered an Area Sacra, a sacred quarter, of the Roman republican era (3rd or 4th Century BC). The area isn’t enormous, but houses the remains of no fewer than four temples, including a 
circular one on the inner wall of which 2,000-year-old murals can be seen from the street. Ground level is a couple of meters below street level, but most remarkably, the fluted columns rise from the weeds and rubble to stretch metres above. How do you lose something that big for a thousand years?(You can find an account, and an interactive 360 degree panorama of the Largo, here. You can see the tram and bus terminus on the opposite side of the Area Sacra from the camera location.)
There are, naturally enough, several information boards round the Area, and we learnt from them that it was on a platform behind one of the temples that Julius Caesar is believed to have been assassinated.
But that wasn’t all … Anyone who saw the Python Life of Brian at a cinema may remember an accompanying travelogue (apparently cut from the DVD versions) which starts out as a straight documentary on Venice, with several comments about the gondolas, before Cleese cuts in with “round the corner—more f**king gondolas!” From there, the travelogue shifts to “the City That Needs No Name: Rome!”, and a view of the wild animals in the Coliseum: namely, cats. But not the Big kind ...It turns out that Rome has a major problem with homeless moggies, who have in fact found a home in the ancient ruins of the Area Sacra. They’re all over the place! – and there’s even a charitable society that looks after them. First thing we saw, and it turned out to be a totally unexpected highlight!
From the Area Sacra, we walked northwards up the narrow via di Torre Argentina and into the via della Rotonda, following the map from our AA CityPack Guide, till we got to the piazza della Rotonda and our target: the Pantheon.
Which, frankly, is indescribable. So here goes … The strength! the grandeur! the grace! the, the, the, … Okay, we give up. There are pictures of it all over the Internet, but they can’t compare with actually being there, especially on the inside, with that enormous beautiful vault and its central Eye of Heaven,
the sole source of light for 2,000 years save for occasional votive candles (the building having been a Christian church for most of its existence). The Eye (Latin: oculus) is 30 feet across, and completely open to the sky. So what happens when it rains? There are cunning small drain-holes drilled into the mid part of the floor, which slopes very very subtly towards them.While we were there, we spotted a seagull circling inside the dome, more than a hundred feet up, and
trying to find a way out. Sometimes rising towards the oculus, sometimes drifting back down, and obviously very tired, it tried more than once to find rest on one of the recesses on the inside of the dome, but each time the angles defeated it and it fell, recovering itself to rise, circle, and try again. Eventually it found a perch, and was still there when we left. (You can just see it in the photo, at full size.)We made our way down to Trajan’s column. This was a second must-see, because of the totally mad reproduction we’d seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Victorians (some of them) developed a passion for making
full-size plaster casts of European sculptural and architectural works, and the VAM has two huge adjoining galleries (a wonderful place to visit) full of things like the complete front of some cathedral, life-sized—and Trajan’s Column, in two sections because it’s too tall to fit otherwise! (We’ve chosen the close-up we took of its base, the real Trajan's Column, that is.)Our way to Trajan’s Column took us through a number of side- and back-streets, and in one of them, the via del Ara Coeli, we stopped simultaneously to look at something that had caught our eyes in the window of a gioilleria, Aliberti’s. It was a silver sculpture showing a pair of nude lovers, the upper parts of their bodies fusing into two intertwined hands. We went in (which required us to go through a security procedure) and bought, not the full-size one we’d seen in the window, but a smaller and more affordable version. It’s made by the silversmiths Ottaviani; you can see it (“Amantes / Lovers”) in the lower half of the catalogue page at their site. (It’s safe to open the page from the link.)
From Trajan’s Column, at the north end of his forum, we walked the via dei Fori Imperiali, The Street of the Imperial Market-Places. The street’s dead straight; Roman, you see—but modern—1930s—and scandalous because it wiped out so many precious
monuments and buildings, running over or through the fora of Trajan, (Julius) Caesar, Augustus, Nerva, and Hadrian (pictured), and alongside the huge Foro Romano which they supplemented because it had become overcrowded. We passed statues of the emperors, including the young Augustus; and each step brought us closer to the colossal ruin at the end of the street: the Coliseum, of course …The entry area was crowded and the queues were long. Margaret found somewhere to sit while Don queued for tickets (and the inevitable guidebook). Once inside, we found a lift that took us to the upper part of the
huge amphitheatre. The real-ness of the ancient stones was wonderful; despite its crumbling state (most literally “dilapidated”), it gave an impression of great strength and stability. But we didn’t go down into the “below-stage” tunnels (now open to the air) to see the Python cats …From the Coliseum we went up (literally) into the streets to the south-east in search of “lunch”; but it was now 15:30-ish, and most restaurants were closed. However, we found a little pizzeria with pavement seating and had genuine Roman pizza before making our way back down to the via Celio Vibenna, skirting the Coliseum, and caught an open-top tour bus—one that included a stop close to the Largo di Torre Argentina, where we’d be able to catch the #8 tram back to Trastevere (or so we thought).
The tour took us round past the Circus Maximus (which Don was keen to see, though it mostly resembles a grassy park at present: but the Italian authorities have just announced plans for a restoration project). You can still see the shape of the ancient racetrack, where races were last held in the 6th Century, but even more impressive are ruins of the palatial imperial residences on the Palatine Hill behind it. (Most literally “palatial”: the word palace comes from “palatine”).The bus took us down to the river, where the sacred and monument-covered Isola Tiberina could be seen, then back into the narrow streets, past the Chiesa Nuova (the New Church: it’s
only 400 years old …), and over the Tiber by the ponte via Emanuele II into the Vatican. Photography was very difficult from the moving bus (we have a few pictures of brownish blurs), but it stopped on the bridge (because of traffic) so we were able to snap the amazing Castel Sant’ Angelo—originally the mausoleum of Hadrian, then a fortress, and now a museum. The angel on the top is St Michael, who was credited with ending a plague in the 6th Century.From the Vatican we re-crossed the Tiber by the marvellously-named ponte Principe Amadeo Savoia Aosta, and trailed northwards along the east bank; but at some point (we’re not sure exactly where) the tour was hijacked by history. The bus ran into a dense crowd of near-stationary traffic, and we could hear and see not only police vehicles but army trucks and soldiers moving about. Eventually, the bus hostess came up (we were, of course, on top) and told us that the streets we should have taken were closed off because of the George Bush protest rallies (we hadn’t even known he was in town). We don’t know what route we took, though part of it was along part of the alternative “B” route that the buses take on some days.
Eventually, we got back to the Isola Tiberina (not the Largo di Torre Argentina, as we;d intended), got off the bus, and took a short detour through the fascinating Ghetto (the Jewish Quarter); but it was now too dark for satisfactory photography with our little digital camera. Before long we were back at the Torre Argentina and on the tram. We got off at the wrong stop initially, but recovered and found our way back to da Claudio’s for a second satisfactory dinner (Margaret got the ossa bucco that had been “off” the menu last night) and a session of writing up postcards over limoncello and white wine …
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