Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

Public transport: Rome has 2 metro lines that cross at the Central Station. Though it is fast, the metro is usually overcrowded and not the most comfortable way to get around. Rome also has an extensive system of buses, even through the night.

For more information, visit the hotel website at www.hotelkennedy.net.

The restaurant staff speaks a few words of English, and we can barely manage a few words of Italian. So we let them decide what we should eat.

A few minutes later the proprietess comes along with a plate filled with tasty marinated vegetables, like cooked onions, potatoes, mushrooms and peppers. When we are finished with the antipasti, the cook himself, an older man with a stained apron (conforming to the typical "Italian Papa" image), comes to inform us that the next course should be fettuccini. He promises us: "Fettucini, nice". We agree to the pasta and are served shortly with a plate filled with fettuccini, sauce and Parmesan cheese.

We finish the meal with the main course, chicken. Not used to such a big lunch, we decide to skip dessert and have a cappucino instead.

We arrive at the Piazza di Spagna after a short but not very comfortable ride on the Rome subway. At the foot of the stairs, dozens of tourgroups are already gathered, although it is not yet 10.30 am. The stairs themselves are exactly like in the many photos we have seen, with the Trinita' dei Monti-church hovering over them. We take a couple of pics and begin to climb the stairs. Funnily enough, the look down is one I have never seen before on any picture.

Once we reach the church at the top of the stairs, we turn left on the road, and as crowded as it was at the foot of the steps, as quiet it is up here. We find ourselves suddenly almost alone. A few hundred meters further to the left, along the road, we discover a look out point with a grandiose view across Rome. In the distance shimmers the dome of the San Pietro church and the Vatican.

We can take our pictures at leisure and admire the young bride and groom that have their wedding photo taken at the ultimate picture spot in a town full of romantic locations.

Though it used to be customary to throw coins into the water to assure a return to Rome in the future, this is no longer allowed.

The grounds around the Colosseum are filled with milling crowds, many clustered in groups that follow a guide who holds up a colorful banner to show them where to go. Hawkers are selling knickknacks (sunglasses, jewelry, carvings etc.). Wandering among the crowds are 'real Romans', dressed like Roman soldiers. Too bad that some are wearing sneakers beneath their costume, or watches. I spot even one 'Roman' wearing a Harley Davidson T-shirt underneath his tunic! But the ones that are dressed to the nines do add to the 'coleur locale'.

We join the queue for tickets to enter the Colosseum when a young woman asks if we speak English. She invites us to join a guided tour so we won't have to stand in line. The tour will cost us EUR 15.-, which is EUR 7.- above the individual fee. After a moment's hesitation and another look at the slow-moving line ahead, we decide to take a chance and agree to her offer. We're not sorry. After a short waiting time a group of 26 people has formed. Francesca will be our guide. She is a certified guide and buys the ticket for the whole group, so we can enter quickly.

Francesca explains that part of the reason for designing the Colosseum was to erase all traces of the cruel emperor Nero. But she warns us not to believe everything we hear about him. A lot of the badmouthing, she says, was done for political reasons. The Colosseum's official name is the Amphiteater Flavium, named after its builders. It was finished in 80 AD. Not all we can see today is original, some restorations have been made. It is obvious from the type of bricks used what is old and what isn't. People scavenging the building for the metal connectors that kept the large marble blocks together made the many pockmarks we can see today.

Some of the ancient temples are nothing but a couple of blocks of stone, and require a lot of imagination. But others still have many pillars left, such as the Tempio di Saturni.

During the day, especially in the high season (spring and fall) it will be very crowded in and around the Forum Romanum. After our visit to the Colosseum we decided to have lunch first and returned around 4 pm. It turned out to be much more pleasant a little later in the day.