Rome For 2 days

Old Sep 24th, 2016, 07:06 PM
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Rome For 2 days

Will be landing in Rome for two days with no real plan, would like to get a feel for the city and its history. And visit some lesser known ruins.. Is there any paleolithic art in Rome, if so, any recommendations out there?
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Old Sep 24th, 2016, 08:13 PM
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For paleolithic art, you go to Altamira, Lascaux, etc. not Rome. From lesser known ruins, you get lesser feel of the city.
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 04:19 AM
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No - there is no paleolithic art in Rome - that is strictly limited to cave areas where early man lived.

If you want to see something older than Roman head to the Villa Giulia which has a wonderful collection of Etruscan objects - many of them personal and household goods (the woman's make-up kit was fascinating).

Suggest you do a lot more research to find what you want to see/do or you may miss some wonderful highlights. Rome was an incredibly advanced large city with many services and features that were lost in europe until the late Renaissance or early industrial age. Defnitely worth checking out.
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 08:10 AM
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You may want to join a small tour to get more info on the city and history, rather than going solo. Walks of Italy does a great job. The Forum and Colisseum tour may be of interest. You might also consider a private guide to customize a day for you, to really understand more about the history you are interested in. Daniella Hunt is a really wonderful guide who is very engaging.

http://www.rome-tours.com
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 09:23 AM
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I don't agree that you get a lesser feel of the city from the lesser-known ruins. At the better-known ruins you may get more of a feel for mass tourism than for the city of Rome.

I suggest that you at least do a walk-by of the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Imperial Forums. Walk all the way around the Colosseum, which the thousands of toursist waiting to get in rarely do. To my mind, the monument is more impressive from the outside than from the inside.

Then, if you walk up the Via dei Fori Imperiali away from the Colosseum, the Roman Forum will be on your right. (Don't miss the Arch of Constantine, near the Colosseum.) After you've passed the Roman Forum, climb up to the Piazza del Campidoglio, where you'll get a great view over the Roman Forum on the way up. The piazza itself is one of the most beautiful in Rome, designed by Michelangelo.

The central building in Piazza del Campidoglio is the Rome City Hall, il Campodiglio. On the weekend, you often see wedding parties here. The other two buildings house the Capitoline Museums, one of two great museums of ancient Roman art and culture in the city. (The other is the National Roman Museum in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, near Termini station.) There are two replicas in the piazza of famous sculptures whose original are inside the museum; the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and the statue of the Capitoline Wolf nursing Romulus, legendary found of Rome, and his twin brother Remus.

http://en.museicapitolini.org/

After you've descended from Piazza del Campidoglio, you can walk down the other side of Via dei Fori Imperiali, towards the Colosseum, to see the Imperial Forums. Behind the last forum is Trajan's Market, an ancient structure that's still in excellent shape. It was originally built to retain what remained of a spur of the Quirinale hill after Trajan had cut away a good piece of it to make a road and a space to construct his new forum.Although it's often called an "ancient shopping mall", in fact the building was mostly used for administrative offices. although, like most ancient Roman buildings, there were shops facing the street at ground level.

Don't miss Trajan's Column, in the forum in front of the Market, which celebrates his victory over the Jews in the 1st century, at which time the Temple was destroyed and the Jewish people in Jerusalem dispersed.

If you go into the Trajan's Market museum, you can even see a fairly intact ancient Roman street, the Via Biberatica, lined with intact shops. The street had many taverns, which gave it the name, related to our modern word, "imbibe", which is mostly used to mean drinking alcoholic beverages. In front of each shop, there is a door sill with a wide groove in it. The shop was closed at night with shutters which fit into this groove. The last shutter was a swinging shutter, and you can see the hole into which its axis fit. The shop owner lived on the upper level, reached by a ladder. When he closed his shop, he used the swinging shutter as a door, which he barred from the inside.

There's now a Museum of the Imperial Forums inside Trajan's Market, which I haven't seen yet, and which features some temporary exhibits along with the permanent collection. The Market also used to host temporary art exhibits; maybe it still does.

http://en.mercatiditraiano.it/

If you don't go into the Colosseum, or either of the two museums, this little itinerary could occupy two or three hours, and would give you a glimpse of many lesser-known ruins that most tourists completely miss. A visit to the Capitoline Museums would add maybe two hours to the visit, but would allow you to see many other artifacts of ancient Rome, including the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter, a part of the ancient Annals of Rome, the history of the city carved in stone. There are also many famous Roman sculptures in the museum, and other artifacts of Roman life.

Given your limited time, this itinerary would give you the maximum amount to see in the least time. If you still haven't seen enough, or if you want something different, here are some other great ruins.

The Domus Romane, under Palazzo Valentini, whose entrance is in front of Trajan's Column, is the excavation of an ancient Roman upper-middle-class dwelling. The visit has to be reserved, and there are some tours in English. There is an excellent sound-and-light show, which shows you how the house may have looked in Roman times. Since I was there, they've added a bit about Trajan's Column and Market, so visiting this before the walk I suggest above might make the walk more meaningful. However, it may not be easy to fit into your limited time schedule. If you want to see it, I suggest you reserve that first and fit the itinerary I outlined above around the time of the visit.

http://www.palazzovalentini.it/domus...x.html#gallery

The Baths of Caracalla (Terme di Caracalla) are among the best-preserved ancient Roman baths in existence. There are beautiful ancient mosaics there.

http://www.coopculture.it/en/heritage.cfm?id=6

The Case Romane, under the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, is a complex of houses, shops, and other ancient Roman buildings. The site is very complex, because the area was rebuilt many times over the course of the many centuries that ancient Rome existed. They do have guided tours, and you can request an English tour.

http://www.caseromane.it/en/

The area around the Case Romane is also worth lingering in. The Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which is above the archaeological site, has a beautiful medieval Comatesque mosaic floor. The bell tower is built on a foundation of the ancient temple of the deified Emperor Claudis. And at the end of the street, there is an arch which is thought to be one of the ancient gates in the Servian wall, the first Roman city wall, dating from the 4th century BC.

The Baths of Diocletian (Terme di Diocleziano), near Termini station (which takes its name from the "terme") were even larger than the Baths of Caracalla, and much of the existing structures were repurposed to other functions, including several churches and a bank. Piazza della Repubblica is on the site of the exedra (entrance hall) of the baths, and the Hotel Exedra on one side follows the line of this exedra.

Across from the Exedra hotel, the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, designed by Michelangelo, occupies a good section of the ancient bath structure, and all around the basilica you can see pieces of the ancient building. Inside the basilica, you can see the oculus in the dome, which allowed light to illuminate the interior. This is the same as the oculus in the Pantheon, except that this one was covered by a glass lantern to keep the rain off the worshippers.

There is a meridian line, marked with the dates of the year, in the basilica, which was designed to mark the exact time of noon. There is a small hole high on one wall, through which a beam of lights falls on the meridian line at noon, on the spot marked by the day's date. For several centuries, the bells of the basilica were rung at noon so that the citizens of the city could set their timepieces. Sometime in the 19th century, the city began instead to fire a cannon from the Janiculum Hill to mark noon, and this is still fired to the present day.

http://www.santamariadegliangeliroma...url=index_foto

(The video is in Italian, but you can see images of the basilica and of many of the ancient remains in and around the basilica.)

On the street to the left of Termini station, as you're facing it, another large part of the Baths of Diocletian is preserved on the grounds of the Museum of the Baths of Diocletian, one of four sites of the National Roman Museum. As you enter the gate, you can see this ancient building on your left-hand side. Inside this ancient hall, there are often temporary exhibits, and there are two painted Roman tombs, found in the Testaccio neighborhood and brought here for safekeeping.

The main part of the museum has an interesting exhibit on ancient Roman writing, from the very beginnings, with the archaic Latin script. There are examples that illustrate the technology of early writing, and also many examples of what people wrote about when it was a cutting edge technology.

There is a new section in the museum about the proto-history of the Latin peoples, which might interest you. However, as I've never been there since this section opened, so I can't say much about it.

http://archeoroma.beniculturali.it/e...ths-diocletian

On the opposite side of Termini station you can visit another site of the National Roman Museum, in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. This has a world-class collection of ancient Roman art and artifacts, including wall mosaics from the rural villa of Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus.

http://archeoroma.beniculturali.it/e...imo-alle-terme

Obviously, you wouldn't have time for much of this on a two-day visit, but you might be able to choose one or two of these in addition to the walk I suggest at the beginning of this post.

If you had lots of time, I would definitely recommend a visit to Ostia Antica, the ancient Roman port city, on a site larger than that of Pompeii, and (in my opinion) at least as interesting.

http://www.ostia-antica.org/
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 11:46 AM
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bvlenci, that is the best guide to Rome. I'm saving it.

You named all my favorite places.
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 12:03 PM
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If I had only two days in Rome, I wouldn't spend a minute of it inside. I'd be walking, walking looking at Piazzas, the fountains, the market in Campo d' fiori, the parks esp the Villa Borghese, fascist architecture, the ghetto . . . .and before I went I'd invest in a book of Roman walks and read a guide or two.
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 12:21 PM
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I am saving this too. Thanks,bvlenci.
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 12:32 PM
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Fantastic post by bvlenci. I've only been to Rome once, and outside of the Galleeia Borghese didn't fall in love with the city, but this makes me want to go again and experience the city with this info at my disposal.
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Old Sep 25th, 2016, 12:39 PM
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Really, it's onlya brief guide to the remains of ancient Rome, and only the less well-known ones. It mentions the Colosseum, Roman Forum, and Palatine Hill only in passing. It doesn't even touch medieval, Renaissance, or modern Rome.

There's so much more to Rome than the big Top 2 (the Vatican Museums and the Colosseum). Many visitors allow time only for these two, and as a result they spend most of their Roman Holiday shuffling along in a crowd of fellow tourists.
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