We left the Castle about noon on Sunday the 5th of July (named for Julius Cesar if you didn't know....or if you did know) and headed back to Rome.  We found the "Interstate" easily enough and headed south.  After a couple of hours, we decided to stop to get a snack and a map of Rome to help find the bed and board villa where we were going to be staying.  Again, easy enough.
     Mary called Simone (the lady that owns the villa) and got some instructions that said take the GRA (loop around Rome) to the west and get off at Exit #1.   Then take that road to Aurelia Antica (old Aurelia) where it splits off of Aurelia then to her villa.  The only problem was that there were lots of splits off Aurelia.  Over the next 3 1/2 hours we took lots of splits and ended up in parts of Rome that would never be on the tours of Rome as well as parts that would be on the tour we took on Thursday.  We even ended back on the GRA at Exit 30 and had to continue on to Exit 1 again.  This was the last of the being lost.  When we got to the first split off Aurelia, I parked the car in the middle of the split and carefully, Mary and I looked for the street sign for the split and compare it with the map.  Mary found a small street that connected the two (only about 100 feet long). It was mostly hidden be a tree.  I backed up a little and headed off to the right.  It was now about 7:00 pm.  In about a half a mile we found her street and turned right on it and her driveway was the 2nd on the right.  I pulled up to the gate and got out and rang her bell.  She answered and opened the gate, for which I was thankful.  She was not a very happy camper with us (me) for being so late, it had caused her to miss a lunch date.  She was gracious when we came in, got us checked in.
     The next morning we got up and had breakfast in the glassed in breakfast room with a couple from Romania and their two children.  They lived in Dublin, Ireland.  She runs a small shop and he is a cab driver.  Their son loves traveling and their daughter 6 or 7 years old was a terror.  Simone has 3 dogs, 2 Doberman and one black and white mutt and the little girl pestered them unmercifully.
   On Thursday morning, or maybe Wednesday night Mary was talking to Simone and found out that The Romanian couple and their kids were evicted from the villa.  Seems that on one night, they ran the room air-conditioner full blast with the windows wide open and the condensation from the evaporation unit in the bedroom flooded the floor in the breakfast area.  The mother was always shouting at the daughter playing (and teasing) with the dogs from the bedroom window. Simone gave them their money back for the rest of their stay and told them they had to go.
    On Monday morning, we told Simone we wanted to turn our car in and not risk the confusion and frustration of driving in Rome and she told us that there wouldn't be any place to park anywhere we wanted to go and the bus system would get us exactly where we wanted to go.  She call the car rental place and found a place we could turn in the car a couple of kilometers from her villa on Aurelia and told us to follow her on her scooter.  We did and turned the car in.  She had given us a couple of single trip bus tickets and told us which bus to take to St. Peter's Square (La Piazza di San Pietro). (Normally we would be taking the 98 or the 881 bus from her villa) We got on the bus and headed for our first days adventure.
     I told the driver where we wanted to get off and he nodded.  At the closest stop to St. Peter's, he held out his right hand for us to get off his bus.  We were within a couple of blocks from the back of St. Peter's and were looking into the 30 or 40 ft high wall surrounding most of Vatican City.  As we crossed one street a girl speaking very good English asked if we wanted to take a tour.  We said yes and she took us to a small restaurente by a rail road track across the street and introduced us to another fellow.  We signed up for the Colesium ,Forum, Circus Maximus tour for that day. We also wanted to book the tour of the Sistine chapel and Vatican museum and Basicilla for Tues with Robin and Lynn.  We gave him a down payment and he told us to meet him there at 9:00am Tuesday morning.
    We had to go to a Tobacco shop to purchase bus tickets (2 - three day passes) to get to the Colesium and look for the guide with the Blue Tour folder named Roberto.  It would be and probably is very easy to fleece touristis like us, but it was all on the up and up.  We got on the bus as directed and headed for the Colesium.  When we arrived it was fairly easy to find Roberto.

  
Roberto was Italiano and also funny in a Pierson sort of way.  His explanations of the design of the Colesium with the male and female available seating and facilities were pretty amusing.  He also use the people on the tour as examples of the characters in his presentation with particular emphasis on the Vestal Virgins and the "non-virgins".  He has to have given his "shpiel" hundreds of time to find out what works best and not.  He was very fluid in his presentation and gestures and who to pick on in the group.  As his presentation went along, throughout the tour it was apparent that his knowlege was in depth, he answered all the questions put to him with ease and in the depth that the tour group wanted to know.  
    After he finished, he turned us over to Jeff, an American living in Rome and also one of the tour guides.  He was a tall lanky guy that had big strides.  --not that that would bother me after hiking a half a mile up to the top of the Colesium and down again.  I now had the task ot hiking 2 mile to the top of the pallatine hill to see the Colesium and Forum  and Constantine's gate.  Mary noticed that when she got to the top of the hill, where the emperors palace ruins were, that she had lost me.  She looked over the rail and found me sitting on the guardrail panting like a hunting dog that chased a deer through the Mississippi woods for 6 hours.  I took about 12 minutes to slightly recover and made it up to her position to find them gone to even higher points.  The only good thoughts in my mind now were about the little Italians that would have to carry my Lard back down for the ME to determine the cause of death.  No such luck, I survived.



  The Arch of
Constantine



The Forum