Things have been pretty busy here in Rome. The temperature hit 100F today, or at least that is what we heard. Still, the city is a relic and much of its past is laid bare, unlike other parts of Europe which have confined their past in a hermetically sealed museum. The Roman Forum, the heart of ancient Rome, is the best example of this. We have enjoyed looking at the ruins and imagining what it looked like. Only a quarter of the stones still reside in the Forum. The area was heavily quarried to build churches like St. Peter's and monuments during the Renaissance. The past three days here have been packed. We met Emily and Laura, who stayed only a block away, on Saturday. On Sunday, we checked out the Forum, the Colosseum, Palatine Hill (where Rome's rich and famous lived), and several gelato places along the way.

Monday was the Vatican. We got up early and arrived in the wrong line at 8:00am. We quickly realized we were in the line for guided tour groups and 15 minutes later were in the appropriate line. At 10:00am the Museums opened and we got in at around 10:40. And we were the lucky ones. Even after we had got in the right line, hundreds of other people queued up behind us along the walls of Vatican City. Inside we thought we would beat the crowds by skipping the first part and heading quickly to the Sistine chapel...boy were we wrong. It was already crowded at the chapel and the tours are one-way. After the Sistine chapel we made our way through the crowds back up through part of the tour only to be stopped by a guard who insisted that going back through the tour was "impossible." After arguing with him for about a minute (hey its Italy, I thought it was appropriate :o) he let us up the staircase to enjoy the Raphael room, Map room and Hall of Constantine at a better pace. The four of us visited the prison that supposedly held Peter and Paul (Mamertine) before heading back home tired and exhausted. As we played Skip-Bo in our room, the four of us relaxed, shared our miseries of the day, and said our "good-byes."

Today, Amy and I visited the Capitoline Museums, which house a lot of Roman antiquities (the famous head from the statue of Constantine and the statue of Marcus Aurelius on his steed), the beautiful mosaics at St. Maria in Trastevere, the amazingly constructed Pantheon, the Trevi fountain, and the crowded and, as we thought overrated, Spanish steps. With the exception of the Trastevere region, we have seen crowds everywhere. WARNING: the beautiful pictures you see at home are taken either in the mid of winter or very early in the morning. Most places here are packed with people. Still, it is amazing to walk across the same stones as soldiers and emperors of a past but not forgotten empire.