Living a Dream

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: Ch...

The Eternal City, the birthplace of seemingly everything, one of the most history-rich places on the planet, and a hell of a place to spend four days. We planned to visit Rome for a while but we needed a long-weekend to make it work. We found that long weekend in February (normally the worst month of the year, but it wasn't bad in Italy) and headed out Thursday morning with a return train Sunday night. The train to Rome took us farther south in Italy than we'd previously been, so that was cool. We got to see more countryside from the train than before and even spotted a few hill-towns off in the distance. The difficult thing with writing about Rome, and the reason I've been putting this off for months, is that everything in Rome deserves your attention. Everything that we took a photo of has a story, and those stories are slightly more familiar than they are in other places. Everything is so grand, so incredible, so ostentatious, so brilliant, or so classically lovely, ...