Well we’ve arrived in Rome , to spend 5 days touring her magical sights, sounds & flavours.<\/p>\n
It is a truly wonderful vibrant city , everything I’d hoped it would be.<\/p>\n
To think that the great Marius, Julius Caesar, Augustus & Constantine (to name only a few) walked these streets and ruled all of the known world over 2,000 years ago is overwhelming. This city is “history heaven” ! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n
We took a 3 hour walking tour around 2 of the 7 hills on which Rome was originally built walking through the immense remains of the Colosseum, Imperial palaces, triumphal arches and the great basilica built by Constantine. It all culminated in the Republican forum. We have walked on the same flagstones that the great Julius Caeser stood on!<\/p>\n
It was in this same forum that he was also cremated, against normal tradition, in front of his loyal troops and the distraught people of Rome following his murder in 44BC by his ‘friend’ Brutus and a group of treacherous senators. It was also here that Mark Anthony made his impassioned oratory to the crowd stiring them up against his assasins Brutus, Pompeii, Cinna et al who then fled from the mob to their Legions in Greece. This all then started a civil war that would see the death of the conspirators, the end of the Republic and the begining of Imperial Rome under the first Emporer Augustus Caesar (a relative of the big man himself, Julius Caesar).<\/p>\n
Absolutely fantastic, there’s not enough superlatives to describe how it feels !!!!<\/p>\n