After another three o clock start, many games of UNO and not even bothering to try and get anyone back to bed we started off to the Colosseum. It was within walking distance of our flat, or so it looked on the map.

We headed down a maze of backstreets and arrived at the large park that was marked on the map. I thought it would be a great place for the kids to run and perhaps another set of swings but instead there was cyclone fencing barricading off more old ruins and the odd drunk. There was scattered rubbish and grass that had been left in many places to become dirt; nothing that encouraged me to want to let my kids run out of site. It was easy to find our way through the park, we went up a slight hill and then Jack, who’s done ancient history at school, pointed into the distance and said with the fascination of someone seeing something in real life for the first time, ‘There it is, there it is!’

The Colosseum was down the hill and across a busy road. The ruins of the old building, although now a third of its original size, dominated the skyline of modern Rome. The sense of thousands of years of history was instant. The cyclone fencing that we had seen circling the other ruins of Rome circled the Colosseum also. It offered a stark contrast between modern day and the carefully placed stones of centuries and centuries ago.

The three o clock start we’d had came in handy. The queues that usually went round and round the ancient building were non-existent. We only had to wait in line ten-minutes to get to a cashier that spoke English.

We booked in for the English spoken tour. Our tour guide was an Italian woman who spoke English with a thick Italian accent. It was hard to understand her on our hand held loudspeaker. I managed to catch about every second word. The younger kids gave up pretty quick, wandering off to look over the wall down three floors to where the lions had eaten the Christians. They followed the intricate corridors into the cells that had been underneath the stage floor, pointing out wiggling lines with their fingers as too which way the prisoners would have had to walk.

Jack persisted with his listening device almost to the end, walking over to Pete and me every now and then with a fact he’d found interesting, ‘Did you know they that it was pretty rare for them to use lions? They were actually more likely to use a bear or an elephant, a lion was a special event.’ And, ‘Back in Roman times they could seat 80,000 people in here.’ The only fact my small brain retained was that all of the original marble had been pillaged from the Colosseum and used in the vast number of churches around Rome.

Poppy, Kai and Noah spent the last twenty minutes telling me how hungry they were. Noah suggesting at one stage that he might loose consciousness if he didn’t get food soon. I snuck him, Poppy and Kai a couple of sugar coated lollies under the strictly no eating signs. I wondered if they were worried about rats gnawing through the old stone.

Outside there were Italians dressed up as ancient Roman soldiers. Pete told the kids to go stand next to them with the Colosseum in the background so he could get a photo. The Italian guys that were dressed up made a huge fuss. Asked where the kids were from, when they found out it was Australia they put their thumbs up for the camera. They held a sword across Noah’s throat as if his head was about to be cut off. There was much laughter and the kids thought it was great. When Pete put the camera away and said thanks the two guys put up their hands, not to wave, but to say five Euros, five for each of them, ten all together. It cost us almost twenty dollars to take a photo with our own camera.

On the way back to the flat we stopped at our first Italian bakery. Bread and cakes twisted and turned into shapes I’d never seen. We squeezed our way inside and were greeted by warm air and sweet smells. There was a cake I’d seen in the front window I wanted to try, twisted golden sweet bread with sultanas. I pointed it out to Pete and then took the kids outside; the bakery was too crowded to fit all of us.

The sweet bread was a combination of Easter bun and croissants with something a whole lot better than both of them mixed through. Between Pete, me, and the kids it was gone by the time we got back to the flat.

Back at the flat it was afternoon naptime again. This time we had everyone in bed by two, the plan being that we would sleep for a couple of hours and then get up and go out for another explore. I woke up at six-thirty busting to do a wee, the flat dark and silent again. We’d over slept and missed out on our afternoon explore but this time I insisted that everyone wake up and stay awake long enough to eat dinner. It was almost impossible. Every time I turned round someone else had curled up on the couch, or the floor, or against the wall, or collapsed with their head on the table. Dinner was short, not much was eaten and the argument after dinner was unusual.

‘No you can’t go to bed yet.’

‘But I want to go to bed now.’

‘No stay up a bit longer, maybe in half an hour, an hour.’

‘I want to go now.’

In the end I gave up and let everyone sneak off to bed. Yes, we were up early again the next morning, though not quiet as early, I think we made it to around four thirty.
But the next day I had a plan, if we stayed out all day there could be no afternoon sleeping and hopefully we would finally get in synch with Rome time.

Pete and I decided the easiest way to get around and see things with over tired kids, particularly Poppy, was to get on one of the Tour Rome buses we’d seen. We picked the one that was subsidised by the government. It seemed to have more stops and you could get on and off all day up until nine at night. We went over to the yellow double-decker bus and lined up to buy our tickets. When we got to the front of the line the guy selling the tickets smiled at us.

‘Quattro?’

Pete nodded and said ‘Si quattro.’

‘Where you come, from?’

‘Australia.’

‘Ah Australia! My brother live in Australia. Perhaps you know him. He live in Melbourne has very good restaurant in Lygon Street. You know him, yes?’

‘Umm, not sure,’ Pete said. ‘I’ve been to Lygon Street, even been out to dinner there, but don’t think I’ve been to an Italian restaurant.’

‘You go, you go for lunch. Si? Go for lunch and you tell them you met me. My brother give you lunch for free. All of you, si? For free.’

Pete laughed. ‘We’ll go.’

‘I’ve been,’ the guy selling the tickets was ignoring the queue behind us, ‘si, me and my family, in Australia 2002. I met the man Steve Arwan, you know him that was killed by the fish? You know him, killed by the fish?’

Pete looked at him blankly for a moment and then realised who he was talking about, ‘Ah, Steve Irwin.’

‘Si, si, Steve Arwin, the man killed by the fish. He good friend of my brother. There’s photo on the wall, me with him, at the restaurant. You go and you see, the photo on the wall at the restaurant, si, you go.’

‘Yep,’ Pete said, ‘we’ll go, eat lunch and look at the photo on the wall.’

‘Good, good, you go and you see. How many tickets?’

After Pete had bought our tickets we piled onto the bus, grabbing a set of headphones before we went upstairs to the open deck. The weather in Rome had so far been kind. Perfect sunny days where we could all get away with a t-shirt and a jumper. The locals though seemed to think differently. They were already rugged up in their long winter coats, scarves around their necks. Pete said it was because of the heating in Europe, everyone got so used to being warm inside that when they went out into the real temperature they froze.

Bus tours are not something I’m into, having to travel with a group and go where I’m told, but it was great to be up on top of our yellow bus. For one thing I didn’t have to worry if everyone was together or not, I didn’t have to look out for cars that might mount the footpath, didn’t have to keep counting heads, and Pete didn’t have to pull his map out of his pocket.

The kids all lined up along the back seat, Jack insisting that it was the cool place to sit. We all put our headphones on and hooked them up to the volume control. Poppy and Kai lasted five minutes, Noah ten, but Jack was intent on what was being said and again shared facts with us that he found interesting. I gave up on the headphones and listened to Jack instead. I was beginning to get the impression that he was going to be our tour guide around Rome.

It was a whole different impression of Rome from up on top of the bus. It was like being on a floating island, our own little tranquil oasis drifting through mayhem, we could watch everything that was going on without having to think, the perfect place for observation. It also gave us a completely different visual perspective. We were now almost in line with the rooftops of the city. We had a perfect view of turrets and roof pitches that we hadn’t been able to see from the footpath below, of sculptures sticking out from the top of buildings that we would never have noticed. And we could observe the crowds on the footpaths, people dodging each other, the occasional dog, someone spitting adding another glob to the many spit spots we had walked over.

The best part though was watching the traffic. The noise of the traffic was still there, the horns, the rev of an engine, someone yelling out their car window, the constant police sirens, but it was muffled compared to when we were at street level. Looking down on the cars below we could see how tight the fit was on the street, how the cars literally had centimetres to spare as they passed each other. There were many times when I thought our bus was stuck, that there was no way it would be able to squeeze through, but it did every time. There was one particular time when I thought we were stuck for sure.

A BMW had been left parked in a narrow road sticking out two inches further than what was good for its duco. When we arrived it was already missing its right rear vision mirror. The bus squeezed, stopped and then squeezed some more before stopping all together. By this stage we had the top of the bus almost to ourselves, Pete and I were sitting up the front and the kids were spread out behind us.

‘We’re stuck,’ I said to Pete, getting up and walking over to the side of the bus where the BMW was and looking down. The bus wasn’t touching the BMW yet, it was within two maybe three centimetres. The kids came over.

‘Wedged,’ I said.

‘Wouldn’t be so sure,’ Pete said.

The bus started moving again, so slow you could hardly detect that it was moving forward. The tiny bit of light between the bus and BMW disappeared.

‘Wedged,’ I said again.

By this time a group of people had gathered on the footpath with beers in their hands. There were big smiles, lots of pointing and the measuring of distance between hands. It was the first time I realised that traffic watching was a local sport in Rome.

The bus driver paused for what seemed long enough to take a deep breath and then crept forward again. Slowly at first but then, before even half of the bus had squeezed past, the driver’s foot was on the accelerator. My teeth were clenched. I was expecting the sound of metal scraping on metal at any moment, but no, we were through.

There was cheering from the footpath below, the small group that was gathered were holding their beers up to the bus.

Noah grinned at me, ‘Just like Harry Potter Mum! Do you feel all squeezed?’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ I laughed.

We decided against getting off at the Vatican because it was Sunday. Our decision was proved right as we pulled up at the huge dome building, the place was thick with people, the biggest crowd we’d seen since arriving in Rome. We stayed on the bus and went back across the Tevere River. The bus wound its way into narrower and narrower streets stopping at the Piazza del Popolo. It was as good a stop as any to get off at and the piazza was empty compared to the Vatican.

The piazza was a huge cobble stoned area with a thin pointed tower sticking straight up in the middle. There were two mounted police on what looked like white Andalsian horses. The kids though were fascinated with three single wheel motorbikes that were being hired out. There was a man with his son and daughter zooming around on them.

‘Can we have a go?’ Kai asked.

‘No.’

‘Pleeease.’

‘No.’

The no was accepted and a game of chasings was started instead. Everyone, including the two policemen, watched as our children played tiggy around the tall pointed tour.

Pete pulled his map out and pointed out an art gallery he wanted to visit, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. It was up a hill and through a park, a good walk from where we were.

The park was much nicer than the one we’d walked through to get to the Colosseum and well used by the locals. There were people bike riding and rollerblading, people jogging and walking. There were creeks with arched bridges that looked like they’d been built back in the time of the Colosseum, sculptures and fountains at every turn and even a maze which Noah and Kai ran through.

We found the art gallery down some long wide stairs, across a road and tramway and then up stairs on the other side. The gallery was filled with the sort of art that made you stop and stare, the sort of art that drew you in and took you to other places. There was modern art and many paintings form artists long dead and gone, including a Monet, the one with the waterlilies.

The kids, after being told they couldn’t run or roll, got into the rhythm of looking at the paintings, always finding intricate little details that Pete and I would have missed. Kai and Poppy found all the dogs and cats, noticed if a child was laughing or crying in a painting. Jack and Noah were the first to point out any nudity, which was in almost every painting, and loved the blood and guts. Particularly when heads were chopped off or guts slit open and spilt onto the ground.

When we walked out of the gallery the weather had changed. It was freezing cold and there was constant rain, heavier than a drizzle but not quiet a downpour yet. We had no jackets or umbrellas. We stood huddled under cover at the top of the stairs waiting for the rain to ease up or to stop but neither happened. In the end Kai and Poppy started jumping down the steps, splashing in the puddles, not caring about the rain falling on their heads. Pete and I had been talking about catching a tram or taxi but in the end just followed Kai and Poppy into the rain.

The only person we saw on our walk back through the park was a guy who looked like he was from Pakistan selling umbrellas. We’d seen these street sellers before, people from everywhere except Italy, India, Pakistan, China, Africa, selling everything from handbags and scarves to umbrellas and little crickets made out of grass. If you looked at them sideways they came in with the hard sell so I’d spent my time avoiding them. This time though we were glad to see the guy with the umbrellas. We bought three from him, five Euro each, the best bargain we’d found since we arrived in Rome – or so we thought. Three umbrellas meant one between two and it meant we would stay dry enough to not have go home, we could go and find the Trevi fountain.

Before we walked away from the guy one of the handles had fallen off. He smiled at us and replaced the umbrella happily with another one from his pile. Ten minutes down the road the other two umbrellas were broken, we turned around to find the guy, so we could replace these as well but he was already gone.

‘Cheap junk,’ Pete said, stretching the material of the umbrella back over its spokes. He was able to fix them enough so they would still do their job, so we could continue on our way to the Trevi.

We stopped at a set of traffic lights, another family with three kids and the same umbrellas stopped with us. The father was speaking in a loud American accent. Poppy who was huddled under my umbrella with me whispered, ‘They’re speaking English.’

The man came over.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Pete. ‘Could you tell me where the Trevi Fountain is?’

‘Just down the hill as you go under this bridge I think,’ Pete answered.

‘Oh, you speak English, wonderful, where you from.’

‘Australia.’

‘We’ve got friends in Australia, they grow grapes over in the West.’

‘That right,’ Pete said.

‘Perhaps you know them,’ the guy’s wife said.

‘Darling it’s a very big country,’ the man said smiling at his wife indulgently.

‘Oh.’

Pete pulled out his map and pointed out where the Trevi was. The guy thanked us and headed on his way.

After pizza in a small restaurant that was warm and dry we wound our way through a maze of narrow streets, so narrow that there were hardly any cars, so narrow that the road was the footpath. The streets were lined with tiny shops. There were paper shops selling fountain pens and inks, hand made paper and paper that was intricately decorated, gelati shops and shoe shops, shops with just handbags and shops with suits that made Pete stop and drewl. We got lost a few times having to back track but I didn’t care, this was what I’d imagined Italy would be like, back streets made out of cobble stones smelling of garlic and leather.

When we did finally find the Trevi fountain it was more luck than carefully following the map, we’d discovered it didn’t include the names of many of the backstreets. We stumbled onto a large crowd first, gathered in a piazza where several streets met. Then we heard the loud noise of water splashing, we’d found our elusive fountain.

The crowd spilled down over the semi circular steps that wrapped around the huge fountain. The fountain, sculptures of gods and horses, was built onto the back of a building. It was hard to tell which had come first, the building or the fountain. There was a green tinge to the sculptures, sort of like the colour copper goes as it ages, but the sculptures weren’t made of copper, they were made of stone. And the water splashing over them and coming through them had the slightest hint of blue, like water you would find in the Alps, it looked like it would be freezing cold. The colour of it was so convincing that it made me dip my fingers in just to see. It was no colder than the temperature of the air.

The kids and I stood with our backs to the fountain while Pete took photos and some movie. It was just on dusk; the lights had come on in the fountain and were shining up at the statues creating huge shadows on the wall behind. The flashes of cameras were going off all around us and people were standing with their back to the fountain throwing coins over their shoulders, the coins landing with a plop in the water. Apparently this is a famous custom, if you throw a coin in with your back to the fountain then you’ll come back to Rome. If you throw in a second coin you can make a wish. The kids all lined up with their backs to the fountain and threw coins, all of them landing in the fountain. Only one coin, Noah’s I think, bounced off a statue and ricocheted back into the water, just short of bouncing back over the wall and hitting Poppy in the head.

By the time everyone had thrown in their coin in we had just enough time to buy the promised gelati – the bribe of gelati was becoming a bad habit, ‘When we get there we’ll buy you a gelati’ – and then head off to catch our bus back to the centre of Rome.

The bus stop though wasn’t easy to find. We were starting to understand that maps in Rome were like mud maps, finer details, like smaller streets that connected main streets, were often left out. Then there was the challenge of actually finding the name of the street we were walking down. It was like a game of hide and seek, who can find the street name first. We finally found our bus stop five minutes after our bus had gone, there wasn’t another one for an hour.

We were on the other side of town to our flat, the sun hadn’t gone yet but it wouldn’t be long, again there was the question of taxi or foot. The kids were nicely hyped on sugar from their gelati, I figured we had twenty to thirty minutes before that wore off. Pete reckoned it would take just a bit longer than that to get back to the flat – if we didn’t get lost, so we headed off on foot with Poppy rolling and everyone else happy enough.

We did of course get lost. We ended up on a main street that was heading towards the Colosseum, a good twenty minutes off target from our flat. I was slowly starting to understand though, that the best parts of the journey are those that you don’t plan. Just after Pete had pulled out his map, yet again, and decided we were definitely going in the wrong direction we heard a brass band playing, we could see a small crowd gathered up ahead.

‘Will we go and have a look?’ I asked Pete who was pulling Poppy along with one hand and tucking the map back into his pocket with the other.

‘Why not.’

We walked up to the top of a slight hill and joined the small crowd. A brass band was playing out the front of what looked like either a police or army barracks. There were about twenty-five men all dressed in formal uniform following the waving stick of the conductor who was standing out the front.

Poppy and Kai weaved their way to the front of the crowd that was made up more of locals than tourists. There were a lot of older Italians who obviously had a ritual around the performance we were seeing. Many of them stood pushed up against the rope barricade tapping their feet. I hung at the back with Jack and Noah. From where we stood we had a clear view of the Vatican in the disappearing sun.

While the brass band played I enjoyed the view of the Vatican in the distance. Just as the band started The William Hurt Overture a black cloud rose above the Vatican, hung there and then swooped falling down to the Vatican’s roofline before it climbed again. At first I didn’t know what I was watching, I stared mesmerised, the music and the church, pulling at my sense of reality, the world of spirits and ghosts poking at my mind. But as I watched the cloud swoop and dive, turn and disappear in the glint of the sun and then reappear with the next turn I realised I was watching a flock of birds. At first I thought it was a flock of the many pigeons that lived in Rome but then I saw that the birds were too small and too black, they were perhaps swallows. I pointed them out to Jack and Noah who were amazed at how the birds appeared to rise and then fall with the music that was playing.

The band finished turned and marched back into their barracks just as the sun disappeared, the birds continued long enough for me to point them out to Pete and then they finished too.

Now that we knew where we were we turned around and backtracked, heading in the right direction. We only had to pull the map out once more on the way home, in the middle of what looked like Rome’s Pitt Street, there were people everywhere, dressed up, obviously out for a night out. We stopped on a corner and looked for street names. Poppy and Kai sat down on the footpath and leant up against the wall, both of them exhausted. Jack looked over Pete’s shoulder trying to tell him which way we should be going, while I walked back down the street ten meters trying to find a name. I found it up high on the wall of a building, scrawled across two bricks. I walked back to Pete, just as I was telling him what the street name was an Italian guy, about fifty or so stuck his head in between us.

‘This is Roma.’

We both had our backs to Poppy and Kai. I nodded, smiled and went back to the map. Pete didn’t even look up.

‘Roma, not some little place in the country, Roma, you have to watch your children.’

‘Yes we know,’ I said hoping the guy would go away.

‘No you don’t. Your children are there, you’re here.’

‘I’m watching,’ I said. Poppy and Kai were still sitting on the footpath leaning up against the wall, they were probably ten feet away from us.

‘There are lots of not nice people here in Roma.’ The guy was starting to get angry now. ‘You need to watch your children. Look! You’ve got your back to them! They’re over there. This is not watching.’

I went to say ‘I am watching’ but thought better of it and called Poppy and Kai over. Poppy winged and didn’t want to get off the ground, but after I asked her to come the second time she got up and came over.

The guy was smiling now, happy that I’d done what he’d said. ‘I’ve got three children,’ he said, ‘I love my children, all of my beautiful children. You have to look after your children.’

The map was back in Pete’s pocket and he was walking across the road.

‘Come on,’ I said to the kids, grabbing Kai and Poppy’s hands tight.

The guy kept calling out after us, ‘Roma, remember you’re in Roma.’

I didn’t let go of Kai and Poppy’s hands until we were back in the flat.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.