Rome, Day 4

After everything we covered on day 1, day 2, and day 3, it's hard to imagine there'd be much left for us to do on day 4 in Rome. But, as the eternal city lives on, so does the adventure.

The day started off rather gloomy and a bit rainy, but we marched toward the imperial forums again to just...soak it in. We took a walk around the Colosseum and up onto the Oppian hill, where the former "Golden Palace" of Nero stood, and now we saw remains of the Baths of Trajan. One remarkable thing about this area was a set of impossibly green birds, which a stranger pointed out to us on a few brief occasions. He kept trying to get closer, ultimately scaring them away, as if he thought they would just sit there and let him pat them on the head or something.

Somehow, more notably, the thing we remember most about this was that there was a man walking a golden retriever, but the golden retriever believed it was a lion. It walked more proudly than any dog I've ever seen: Chest out, head up, ears perked, tail straight out, slowly strolling...a majestic creature.

Anyway, we returned back to the main streets, eyeing the forums again and staying out of the way of the parade that was starting.

It was not a very big parade.

After staring at it for days, we finally caved and went inside the Vittoriano statue - the giant thing of Vittorio Emanuele - and it ended up being pretty cool. 

From the front/side

Pretty cool views from the top as well

Finally, for our last official thing to do in Rome, we actually went into a museum. Rome has about a thousand museums and all of them are good (according to sources). I was told that the best of them is the Capitoline Museum, right behind the monument from the above photos. It houses some of Rome's most famous artworks that I really wanted to see, and Jenna didn't care which museum we went to, so we approached the Capitoline on Sunday afternoon.

There are so many cool things in this place. There are giant heads...

Eerie busts...

Marcus Aurelius on a giant horse...

Jenna in front of a fountain which she got yelled at for sitting on (but I saw a photo of Chuck Prueter sitting on the same fountain, which is suspicious)...

There's also Romulus, Remus, the Dying Gaul, Hercules, Cicero, Socrates, Venus, all the emperors, Apollo (I think), Medusa (Ol' Snakes-for-Hair, as she was probably commonly called), and my favorite view in all of Rome.

Looking out from inside the downstairs window of the Capitoline Museum, seeing the remains of the imperial forum...there are arches, temples, churches, the Colosseum, and so much more. And at some point, all of those remains were fully-standing buildings. They may not have all been up at the same time, but they all existed. This was a really cool last-stop of the weekend because I ended up standing at this "window" for quite a while trying to imagine what things used to look like. Conveniently, there was a legend next to me that named each landmark out in the forum. 

We concluded our trip by wandering at great lengths to go essentially nowhere. We stopped and got gelato a couple of times to hold us over until our train home, and we departed around sunset from the most remarkable city in the entire world.

Rome is incredible.