Piazza Venezia

The day after our visit to the Colosseum, Sue decided to have a rest day, frankly, I didn't blame her and would have had one myself except that the nephew now had only four more days in Italy, before he had to catch his flight back to Manchester.

Anyway, Harry nephew and I left Sue to her book and headed for the bus stop, but not before buying a couple of beers to stash in the fridge, so as to be good and cold on our return!
When we got to the Metro station, we decided to have a cheese and ham toasty, along with a cappuccino at the busy little station cafe, there was no rush, I think the trains were every 15 minutes or so and it gave us a chance to chat about what we were going to do.

Brunch over, we went on to the platform and felt quite smug about our timing, the digital display hanging above the platform showed that the next train was due in two minutes. One uneventful journey later, and we got off at the 'Colosseum' stop, as we had the day before. As we left the station, we still had to stop and pay our respects to the mighty Colosseum before we turned away from it.

We headed in the direction of the winged horsemen. Skirting the Roman Forum on the right, we had no sooner started than we were confronted by more ruins, and archaeological digs, along with bronze statues of Julius Caesar, then there was the huge, 40 metre high, Trajans column with St Peter standing on the top. To our left, the building that is the, Victor Emmanuel Monument, started to unfold, the top of which we had seen from behind, during our walk around the Roman Forum. It was incredible to see it in all of it's glory. I'm not going to recite facts and figures about it here but, suffice is to say that it is on a grand scale and worthy of a visit to Rome, in itself. 

Several dozen photos later, we moved in a direction that we hoped would lead to the River Tiber. We had seen on the map that there was an island in the river, suitably named Tiber Island. It's boat shaped. OK, I wasn't impressed. I've seen it described as 'magical' well, maybe like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. By now we were casually wandering past all manner of ancient buildings and remains. We didn't intend to, it's just that it was all getting a tad overwhelming. You could quite honestly spend a full day just on one street in Rome. We were never going to do it justice in 4 days, that was abundantly clear!  We left the river to cast it's spell over others and headed along some of the back streets to find a suitable watering hole, before heading back for the station. Another whole day had passed in a blur. We got back just before dark and Sue, bless her, had a hot meal waiting for us. We sat outside and talked about our day, and consumed our well earned, now nicely chilled beer. Tomorrow was going to be another busy day with the Trevi fountain and Pantheon on the cards. I could do with a rest day myself now!