At the coliseum

It's hard not to cry in this place. It's one of those weird places on the earth in which history is powerfully present. I kept imagining the Christian martyrs being led here to be slain in front of the mobs. What they were feeling and thinking...and how it certainly WASN'T that Jesus of Nazareth was just a nice guy with a cool message.

I took a few crumbs of brick off one of the walls. And, no, I can't really excuse that because if every visitor did it we wouldn't have a coliseum, but I'm a dramatist, and I got this idea in my head that it would be cool when our time of matrydom comes to be clasping some of the coliseum.








Here are bloggers Karen "Some Have Hats" Hall and Sr. Bernadette "In Rome" in front of what our completely secular guide assured us was an entertainment complex no different from those we frequent today. It was hard not to laugh as our guide vented weird wrath on Western civilization, and seemed to be pining away for the days when 100 lions and 20 elephants were set upon each other for the amusement of the Roman mobs.

I love them, but Europeans can be very odd. (Let's not even start on bathrooms.)

Here are two people I don't know being granted clemency outside the Coliseum by the Emporer of Imperial Rome and a handy centurion. I know he is a centurion because of his hat.