Rome - just a little more Rom-ing....

Well, we had a few hours before the train left Rome so we hired Maxisimo our driver from the prior day to come back to the hotel and load up our luggage and us, and take us for another drive around. Instead of more in-city sights, we went to a hilltop with a wonderful view of the whole city - it looked a lot less croded from up theree, anda memorial to Garibaldi. There was a large park with hundreds of columns topped by busts of various soldiers, and it was a very quiet, welcoming place. From there we drove through a very nice older residential part of the city and out through one of the original gates in the Medieval wall surrounding the old city. There we saw a stone pyramid build by Caius XXX (I lost his name) as a tomb for himself and his family, which ahd literally been built into the later Medieval wall...it really was a very spectacular spot. We made a turn onto the "new" Appian way, and followed it to eventually turn down the "old" Appian way, the ancient road which among other things had been the site for the tombs of thousands of nobile Romans. The toms are mostly rubble along the roadway, punctuated by anaoccasional column or archway, and the road itself occasil;anny revbeals the original stonework making for abumpy drive...I have to wonder how the Romans ever managed to stay on their chariots! No wonder the dignitaries all got carred!

We followed the road out into the countryside, open fields covered in purple wildflowers. We went under a bridgew and there in front of us was miles of almost-intact Aquaducts, built in three levels in order to bring three different types of water in from various parts of the hills. The way they were built had intruiguing sluce mecanisms to pump the water along to get it even uphil when necessary...it was a magnificent sight!

From there, Max took us to the trainyard and got us loaded into our train compartment. We settled in and had brought a light dinner with us to eat in our room instead of eatingin the dining car. Since we had left the company of the group we had traveled with through Italy, it was nice to be able to sit back and enjoy the scenery in quiet. We went to sleep watching the countryside of Northern Italy pass by, and woke up to the fiels of Southern France.

Max's tour retrieved our view of Rome - it was not so bad after all.