And so we were back in Rome. We had been for dinner in the Piazza Navona and had made a ridiculously fast dash down to Trajan's column to meet a tour group for an evening underground tour of the Colosseum. (That was partly my fault; it had been a few weeks since I looked at maps of the area and was over-reliant on Google Maps to get us where we needed to go. Google Maps is great when you're actually moving. But it can take a little bit of time to orient itself when you start a route, particularly if there are two different, alternative routes which take about the same amount of time but have you starting off in different (in this case opposite) directions. Of course the other problem was that we hadn't really left enough time. We needed to be at the meeting point 15 minutes before the tour started. However obviously the tour wasn't going to start at that time so we could have taken an extra 10 minutes to make the trip more leisurely and still been OK to join the group.)
In any case, we got to the appointed rendezvous point exactly on time. From there we made our way around to the Campidoglio, the square that Michelangelo designed to sit atop the Capitoline Hill. The entrance to the Campidoglio is a staircase that leads up to the Piazza. The top of the staircase is flanked by statues of Castor and Pollux with their horses. Actually I'm not sure which is intended to be which, but given the usual order of their names I assume that Castor is the one on the left when facing them. That would be this one, seen from behind.
2000 years, almost, I had waited to get back home to this city. But two thirds of our time in Italy was already behind us and only three and a bit days were left in Rome itself. The sun was setting on our time here, just as it was setting over the city in this shot. And I could feel the shadows lengthening.
Still, some adventures still lay ahead of us including Gladiator School which was two of the best gorramn hours of my life. I plan to go back of course, but that's a long way off in both time and money.
