Rome; Sunday, 25 February, 2007

I checked out from the hotel and walked back to Termini where I dropped off my luggage, then hopped on the metro out to Pirmide and then the overground train out to Ostia.

Ostia was once the main port of Rome, located at the mouth of the Tiber. However, over time the course of the Tiber has changed, and the river has silted up. Today, Ostia is two kilometres from the cost. You can visit the new Ostia, Lido di Ostia, but the descriptions of it make it sound like a massive beach that is home to “Rome by the sea” The original Ostia does, in large parts survive as one of the finest examples of Roman ruins anywhere in the world. And very few people seam to know about it. In Rome the queues for the seven ticket booths at the Colosseum stretch for over 40 minutes. At Ostia the queue for the single ticket booth was three people!

The area that the town occupied is massive. I had thought that in the four hours that I had to explore the site before I had to start making a move back to the airport would leave me time to spare, in the end I only saw a little over half the site.

Everywhere you look there are the remains of the town, from the necropolis at the entrance to the Forum, Theatre and Warehouses in the middle. It’s very easy to imagine what life might have been like in the town at its height.

In places there are large mosaics still intact after 2,000 years. Not just in the baths, but the mosaics that shop keepers had put down outside their premises to lure shoppers in. In the bakery you can still see the indentations made in the cobbles by the hooves of the donkeys as they turned the mill stones.

After looking round large parts of the site I looked at my watch to see what the time was, with an idea to go and grab some lunch. Instead I found that it was almost half one and I needed to be making a move back into the city to pick up my luggage, so I walked back to the main gate (a nearly 10 minute walk in itself) and back onto the station where I waited for the train back to the city centre.

Sadly, Italian railways proved themselves to be about as reliable as British ones by cancelling the train, so I had a fifteen minute wait before the next one, by the time it arrived I suddenly realised that I had been out in the Sun for the best part of half a day without any protection and had to face the real possibility of having managed to get sunburnt in February.

I picked up my luggage from the left luggage office, brought my ticket for the airport express and started the journey home.