Rome: Gelato is our Motto

We arrived in Rome last Saturday and are staying here for a week. We live in an old apartment building from the 16th century, with a very nice apartment, and we are almost right next to the Roman Forum. We were across the piazza from the Tarpeian Rocks, where traitors got thrown off to their death by the Romans.

First we went to the Roman Forum. I saw the arc de triumph of Emperor Trajan, and the arc de triumph of Emperor Titus. On the arc de triumph of Titus, there is a sculpture of the menorah of the temple that was destroyed by the Romans. There was an enormous column of Emperor Trajan, where they sculpted all of the stories of his conquests. We saw the Cloaca Maxima, which is the main sewer system of the Romans, and is still used today: you can smell it! The whole forum is like a big park, where some of it is fenced off, and there are ruins in the fenced-off parts and everywhere. There are ruins of temples, and where people used to meet, and the Roman senate.

Right behind the Roman forum is the Colosseum, a big amphitheater. The Colosseum was built so that you could put beasts in there, humans in there, and you could even flood it so you could have ships fighting each other in it. The Colosseum was not very interesting or amazing but it was still worth seeing. It got its name from the statue of emperor Nero that was next to it. Since the statue was colossal, they named the amphitheater colossal too.

Next we went to the Capitoline hill which was right by our apartment. It had a big windy street to go up to the top. It was the holiest hill in Rome. That is the hill where the geese were that gave the alarm to the Romans when the Gauls attacked Rome. On the Capitoline Hill there is the statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius riding on a horse that is all made of bronze. In the museum next to it, there is a statue of a dying Gaul that was all made of marble.

We spent a whole day walking around town, from pizza to piazza, and that evening we went to the Piazza di Spagna and the fountain of Trevi. We had ice cream at the Piazza Navona. We also stopped to see the Pantheon. It is a huge circular roman building, with a dome and a hole at the top, and the coffin of Raphael.

The best museum in Rome is the National Museum. It was almost deserted. In it we saw lots of famous statues, like an old Greek boxer all made of bronze. We also saw a marble statue of a man throwing the discus at the Olympics. There were also lots of mosaics and paintings that looked like they were very hard to make, and we also went into a room that was completely painted on the walls with one garden.

In Rome we have been eating gelato at least once a day. Gelato is basically ice cream, except it is a lot better and not exactly the same: Italian gelato is the best ice cream in the world. Last night we ate crepes on an island on the Tiber, while we reclined on pillows on the ground, which I hear is more or less how Romans used to eat.