Italy: All Roads Lead to Rome

To finish our vacation, we spent 4 days in beautiful Rome! (at least in the tourist-y part of Rome near Ancient Rome)

In the cab on our way to the hotel we passed a giant monument and exclaimed "HOLY CRAP, WHAT IS THAT?!" Well, it turns out it was the National Monument to Vittorio Emmanuele II, the first King of unified Italy. The second photo below is for scale so that you can try to understand how truly massive this thing is. Those bronze statures on the top left and right... I'm still tiny compared to those statues.

Vatican City

You'll be happy to know that I did not burst into flames when entering St Peter's Basilica.

The Vatican Museums were excellent, and I highly recommend them! Make sure you get your tickets online though because the line to enter the building is 2 minutes long, but the line to get tickets is 2 hours. 

Ancient Rome

The next day we spent visiting the ruins of Ancient Rome: Palatine Hill, The Roman Forum (which is a large collection of ruins) and the Colosseum. 

At one point in the Forum, we had a lovely spot with the Colosseum in the background and stopped to take a photo. When taking these selfies with my DSLR I'll end up taking about 10 while varying the angle and position so I can make sure to get a good one. The shutter is very quick and it provided us this fantastic result... because something happened between this photo and the next...

THUNDERCLAP!!

The Forum was lovely, but it wouldn't let us leave! The storm was quickly moving toward us, so we decided to move on and get to the Colosseum, but every exit from the Forum was closed! We were walking through the sprinkling to exit after exit, but closed, closed, closed! We had to walk all the way back to the beginning of the Forum and then head over to the Colosseum. It took us about 30 minutes of walking around in the Forum to get out, but in the last minute before getting into the Colosseum the clouds burst and drenched us!

Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon and more!

Archimedes!

The National Museum was hosting an exhibit dedicated to Archimedes called The Art of Science and Invention. How could we resist?! And the exhibit was interactive! Yay, science!

Theresa has a great idea, "Eureka!"

Hotel Teatro di Pompeo

Our Hotel was reasonably nice and it had the cool aspect of being built into one of the Ancient Roman theatres! All of the hotels in this area of the city are "Hotel Teatro di Something" because they are all part of the ancient Theatre. You could see the old Roman Theatre structure down in the basement where breakfast was served.

And, of course, FOOD!