Click the images for full-size versions!

We rose, not as mosquito-bitten as in Venice but still noticing a few little red bumps, breakfasted on apples and wandered out along the cobbled streets. Central Rome is littered with gigantic baroque churches, fitting almost seamlessly into the blocks of insulae, and we wandered some way into one (Sant’Andrea della Valle, if you’re wondering) before realising there was actually a service going on in one of its wings, and politely withdrawing.

We ascended the vast, cold, gleaming marble typewriter of the Vittorio Emanuele monument – a vulgar triumph of 19th century bombast over classical class, and the imaginary Italian concept over the concrete Roman one, stamped in blazing, incongruous white on the knocked-down rubble of archaeology and filled with a museum to Italy’s triumphs over the only people Italians have consistently beaten on the battlefield (other Italians). Down its slippery white steps to the Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Mussolini-era road running roughshod across the entire ancient forum, which is on reflection an even more offensive piece of nationalist vandalism than the “Altar of the Fatherland”. At least the typewriter is fancy.

Along the road, millennia-old bronze emperors look down on the African touts and the strings of fat tourists on segways with dark, empty eyes. Behind their plinths are great tracts of pure archaeology. Trajan’s column, as magnificent in person as expected, showed Romans building bridges and oppressing Dacians, and the Colosseum loomed vaguely in the hazy eastern sky. Rather than join the immense queues there, we slipped on past to the near-deserted ticket booth for the Palatine Hill, which conveniently also gets you into with the Forum and… the Colosseum.

Despite the clouds of fellow tourists and the hot midday sun, the Palatine was quiet and serene. We looked down on the weed-strewn but vast Circus Maximus, across at the dark humps of the other hills of Rome, and strolled through an enormous complex of ruined aqueducts and ancient palaces. The hill’s name casts a long shadow – palace, paladin, Palatinate – and so do the enormous ruined complexes that crowd its upper levels, less a single unified palace than a series of attempts to outdo each other by successive emperors, occupying the same space with a tightly-packed collection of megastructures. The ruins are mostly made of the wide, flat Roman bricks, rather than the “classical” marble they were once clad in; their skins were nicked by the smaller, lesser Christian successor states to build their smaller, lesser palaces. Here and there, the terracotta core of a column is still half-clad in white marble, a coffered roof retains gorgeous plaster detailing, a breathtakingly beautiful piece of carved marble lies on its side in the long grass – but most of the detail, and most of the grandeur, now only exist in illustration and imagination.

Someone had talked the Hill’s conservators into running a set of modern art pieces among the palaces, which ranged from the merely pointless (look, some umbrellas) to the pointlessly offensive (falling Jesus babies, a giant stuffed Goofy taking a shit). If anything, the total intellectual and artistic poverty the modern tosh showed made the palaces seen even classier. Some English-speaking tourist with a biro had said what we were all thinking, leaving notes of “what are you thinking of your work is crap” and “art??? NO” on the associated signs.

Down into the Forum, an eclectic mix of remains ranging from still-recognisable temples, forlornly standing columns and scatters of stone things that make sense only to archaeologists. Highlights included the absolutely staggeringly huge Basilica Maxientius (the only thing more impressive than its cathedral-sized trio of arches is the fact that it’s less than a third of the original building) and a catacomb marked with one of the best phrases in any language, the “Neronian Cryptoporticus.” Exit signage wasn’t good, and we spent quite a while frustratedly wandering the labyrinth of ankle-twisting cobbles before getting back out onto the streets.

Gelato revived our spirits; a restaurant offered me the choice of the €15 “Being A Bit Sick” or the €20 “Kill Yourself”, and as it was a hot day I went for the former. Then, to the Colosseum itself, now that the queues had abated a little – colossal, and even late in the day absolutely rammed. There’s only so much to say about the Colosseum – everyone has seen it, it’s painfully iconic and pretty much exactly the way you’d think. But bloody hell is it impressive.