Today was our last full day in Rome and Italy. We booked a self guided audio/video tour at the Colosseum for 9:30am. Read the wikipedia page here. We booked our tour using the official site for the Colosseum here: Coopculture.it
We woke up extra early so we could get ready and I ran to the French cafe to grab our croissants, coffee and juice to go. I came back with all the breakfast goodies and we ate them in our hotel room before heading out.
When we arrived in Rome our hotel recommended using an app called FreeNow for calling taxis. So I loaded it on my phone and set our pickup location and dropoff location. The taxi pulled up to the corner of our hotel in about 3 minutes. We didn't have to say a thing and we were dropped off pretty simply at the Colosseum plaza in about 25 minutes. We definitely recommend this app if you are coming to Rome. It may also work in other areas.
We researched tips about visiting the Colosseum and one of the biggest suggestions was to ignore anyone offering you tickets, water, trinkets or anything. Just act like you don't hear them and be as rude as you want by doing so. Immediately when we got out of the taxi someone asked if we had tickets or if we needed them. We didn't respond. He asked again. No response. He asked us again. No response. Then he yelled out, "do you speak ANY language?!" We kept ignoring him and walked down the stairs to the Colosseum entrance. There were many more people asking if we needed tickets along the way but that guy was the most aggressive.
When we got down to the entrance there was one line for pre-purchased tickets and one for people who needed tickets. The lines were very short and moved quickly. We went in and went through a security scanner, similar to the airport. Then we went over to the registration desk and got our printed tickets. We took those tickets over to the audio/video tour booth and stood in that line, which was about 5 people deep. We received our little iphone and headsets and went into the Colosseum.
When we got to the first level up some pretty tall stairs I realized I didn't have the map that it was referencing in the guide app on the phone. So I went back downstairs and stood in a now much longer line at the audio/video booth to get our map. When I got to the window the lady told me that the map was BUILT INTO THE APP! She didn't say that before when she gave us the guide phones so that was frustrating and wasted 20 minutes and made me have to go back up and down the Colosseum. By the way, the people that bought the audio only guides didn't seem to like the audio quality as much as we liked our audio/video combos. And everyone that was part of a large guided tour was beyond annoying. Don't join those.
We wandered around the Colosseum a while listening to our guide and trying to get photos with no Instagram models in our backdrops. We think we got some good photos and really took in some of the greatness of the architecture of the arena. Thinking about the history of this place while being inside of it was pretty surreal. We spent about an hour and a half in there and I think that is plenty because what started out as a cool morning was quickly getting unbearably hot.
Our tickets included entry into Palatine hill and the Roman forum across the piazza so we dropped off our audio/video guide phones and headed over.
As we approached the ruins and walked up the ramp to the entrance we saw many vendors selling bottles of water, wooden trinkets and other random things. We kept going past them ignoring their calls and then we noticed the line that was waiting to enter the grounds. The line wasn't terribly long but at this point the heat was so bad the idea of standing in that line which was moving very slowly was not appealing at all. It probably would have meant standing in the sun for over an hour at the pace it was moving. We took a few photos from around the area and then went in search of lunch food.
We decided we would walk away from the Colosseum piazza and look for food towards the Tiber River and hopefully a bit less touristy.
We walked a few blocks stopping here and there trying to find a place with outdoor seating that was in the shade. Nothing was looking good for awhile. Then we walked down this busy street with lots of restaurants that looked promising. As we approached these restaurants their staff started aggressively trying to convince us to eat there which had the exact opposite effect.
We kept going and found a little pizza shop in a dead end alley tucked back in the corner of a street. It was nice and breezy in there and had plenty of shade. We started out our lunch with some Aperol Spritz. Then we ordered fried artichokes, fried zucchini flowers, a green salad, a margherita pizza with arugula and a cheese and mushroom pizza. The pizza was really good. It was more of a crispy cracker type crust and held up great. They didn't cut the pizza into slices but gave us knives and forks to eat it how we like.
After lunch I used the FreeNow app to call a taxi again and we got a ride home to begin pre-packing for the flight home the following morning.
For our last dinner in Rome we went to a place around the corner from our hotel room called Pupina. The dining area was cozy, the service meh. The food was pretty good but Deanna's noodles were too al dente. We had a salad with burrata, pasta with truffle, pistachio semifreddo and a bottle of chardonnay.
We went back to our room and had some self made aperol spritz and finished packing.
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