All roads lead to Rome

Now we got to the capital of Italy, the town to which every road leads to. We arrived at our hostel in the evening and started planning which places we gonna visit here. There we met Nicolas a guy from Canada, he has already been in Rome for some days but he was also interested in seeing some places.
The first thing we visited was the Colosseum, it's still in a rather good condition and looks absolutely awesome. It's so amazing that people were able to build such huge buildings, more than two thousand years ago. Thank to some good royals in the past it got repaired several times and no one destroyed it, would have been a big lost.

Next to the Colosseum is the Foro Palatino con Mostra. This place is a very big ruin, only few buildings are still in a good condition. At the beginning the area of this ruins did not look that big, but after getting around a corner there were more and more ruins, again a corner and even more. It felt like we entered a separate town made of ruins. It did not seem to end at all.

From the Foro were the bath of some ruler used to be we got a view to the circus Maximus, at this moment Bernd did not know that it was the rest of the circus, it more looked like a construction area and some lawns.
After walking through the ruins for ages, don't get it wrong, it still was interesting there, only another expression to say how big this area is, we left the ruins and headed to the capital. A big white building, located on a small hill and giving a good overview above Rome. Good that this town has no skyscrapers blocking the view.

Next we headed to the building with the hole in the ceiling, no damage here. The Pantheon was build that way, we got here the wrong time so the light was not falling to the marked circle on the floor but it was still nice there. Some funny thing happened there, the guys taking care of this place made an announcement in several languages to remind the tourists to be silent, so far not really interesting, but in German they said that the people should talk silently not like the other announcements telling to shut up. Also the persons walking around there were strange, it did not bother them having people sitting around at the columns, dropping trash outside, but they do not want to have someone sitting there and taking off the shoes. It was outside in front of it ... strange rule.

Fontana di Trevi, only a short walk away from the Pantheon was the next stop, good that everything is so close by. The fountain is not so huge, but worth seeing and being there. As expected it was totally crowded, but not enough to make Bernd mad about all this people passing by, so we still could take a picture or two.
Since we got here I also flipped a coin into the fountain, don't know if it really works but it's worth trying.

This time Bernd was not the first one, who needed a break from walking around and getting back to the hostel. Nico was so exhausted that he could not keep on walking, he brought out an excuse about having some work to do. Well we kind of believed him and let him of the hook and leave. So as usual Bernd and I kept on exploring, like never getting tired of it.
So we went to the Spanish stairs, not only one time. Because we got there during the daytime we also went there later at night, to get the feeling of the way the people are living here, also the tourists always being interested in special places.

Greetings to Maria from Bernd, we had to search a while for your founders stone at the Piazza del Popolo, seems like the only founders stone left or the only one we were able to find a name on. Too late we realized that the Leonardo da Vinci museum was close by, otherwise we also would have taken a look inside.