The Roman bus dance

Getting kind of tired of walking everywhere so we thought we’d give Rome’s transit system a try. Tickets are reasonable, for a single trip it’s 1.5EUR, 2-day pass is 12.5EUR and a week pass is 24EUR. We’re doing the week pass because there are just too many sites, too far away to continue walking. For example, Hadrian’s villa, Villa Adriana, is in the city of Tivoli some 38km from Rome and Ostia Antica is about 30km from Rome, too far to walk.

Now Rome being a modern city, has fine tuned their mass transit system to the point where it runs like a well-oiled machine. They have close to 350 buses, 20 trams, 3 subways all neatly laid out in a grid that resembles a spiral-graph drawing. I’ve spent the better part of 2 hours trying to find a working version of a route planner, a readable map of bus lines and a timetable that has a rough approximation of times. Swing and a miss! Best we came up with was a bus that comes close to our apartment, only a 20-minute walk from the stop. That’s our baby, bus #87 or bus #23 if we’re anywhere along the Tiber.

We’ll do a dry run today when we go out to the ancient cattle market, the National Museum of Rome and what ever else we find on our way. We need a dry run because on Monday we have a tour of the Colosseum, the Forum and Palatine Hill that lasts for 3hrs, so walking home would be a drag, literally!

Beautiful Sunday morning here in Rome, cooler today, around 72F for a high and just a little chance for rain, ~20%. It rained like crazy yesterday, glad we took the day off. The only problem was trying to dry our laundry. The apartment has a clothes washer but not a dryer so we hang our clothes on a drying rack. With the humidity at 100%, not a hell of a lot of evaporation taking place.  Not to worry, still have a clean thong and socks so I’m set.

We decided to walk to the site of the cattle market, only 15 minutes along the Tiber and an easy walk. This is one very unique site. When we were here in 2006, we walked past these buildings almost everyday and didn’t know what they were. We were doing the tourist thing and wanted to see the popular sites, not some obscure little ruin. Now, we’re looking for the obscure, the unadvertised ruins, the ones that depict daily life in ancient Rome. They’re everywhere!

Forum Boarium, was a cattle market where Romans went to buy meat. It was located along the Tiber where ships from all over the world would dock and sell their wares, especially meat. The site was also home to a cult that worshiped Hercules. They built a temple in his honor, the Temple of Hercules Victor, that dates back to 120BC. This building is the most complete ancient building in Rome, and nobody gives it a second look. Everyone is hustling off to the Colosseum.

Located next to the Temple of Hercules is the Temple of Portunus, god of – are you ready for this- doors, ports, keys and cattle.  Not making this up, he was the god of doors, ports, keys and cattle. What these things have in common or why a single god for all, beats the hell out of me. But it’s true! This temple was built around 100 BC.

Walking a little further, we get to the main square of today’s Rome, the Termini or train station located in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. The National Museum is here along with the Baths of Diocletian. The Baths are impressive but not much remains except some of the structure. Most of the buildings have been destroyed or absorbed by the museum, but when it was built, 306AD, this bath complex was twice the size of the Baths of Caracalla. This facility could hold 3,000-3,500 bathers simultaneously! The complex was built on 32 acres with the central block of baths taking up 11 acres!

The museum is our next stop, and what luck, today is the first Sunday of the month and all museums have free entry. Sounds like two glasses of wine will be in order later today! I can’t possibly do justice to the artifacts inside the museum so I’m going to show a lot of the pictures we took, maybe with some descriptions but there was just too much to research before the visit. Mea culpa.

Now the moment we’ve been waiting for, the bus ride. Got our tickets in the metro station and rode the subway to the Colosseum, that went fine. Now lets’ find our bus, #87. The first problem is the Colosseum is round so when you look for a side street with a bus stop, there’s 10 of them. Naturally we went to the wrong side but we did find #87, going the wrong way. So, walk around the Colosseum until we see #87 again. Sounds easy except the roads intersect and move in and out while we walk around so it’s not as easy as staying on one side of the road, we needed to cross the street, 3 times.

At last, found the stop, waited and got on our bus, good old #87. The bus circled the Colosseum made a right turn and came to a complete stop, traffic jam. It took 30 minutes to travel a distance we could cover walking in 5 minutes! Enough, next stop get off the bus and walk home.

Back to walking again. Past the ancient cattle market, up the hill and wouldn’t you know it, another set of ruins. We walked into the old Jewish Quarter and the Theatre of Marcellus. Again, not on the “got to see” list of most tourists but simply amazing. These artifacts you can actually touch! Really cool when you think that 2000+ years ago there was another person touching these, for the first time. Carving, chiseling, polishing marble into figures, flutes, grandiose Corinthian columns with elaborate capitals. Built for Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar in 13BC, this theatre looks like a miniature model of the Colosseum. Great way to end the day.