Up at 6.30am, in order to beat the crowds, we returned to Trevi Fountain about 7.15am . Some glamour pusses had already beaten us there, complete with full makeup, hair done and provocative poses.. At least we managed to get a photo in and throw a coin!

It's beginning to dawn on me that things are not always as they are promoted to tourists ! Revelations 101…

Take this "skip the line" gig that just about everyone is touting at just about every location…

This is peak season for traveling through this part of the world, and by Jingy's, the locals know it! With enormous queues at just about every location, you would have to be sun struck (which we aren't due to our therapeutic afternoon siesta's) not to opt for the skip the line tickets…

This my friends, is the trap… Everyone goes for the skip the line tickets!!

I have discovered that if you avoid the skip the line tickets, you actually skip the line for the skip the line tickets, which means you skip the line by not skipping the line… Read that bit again and you'll understand what I mean…

I know I mentioned this before in Florence, but I had purchased skip the line tickets for the Colosseum tour, only to arrive 30 minutes before opening to a massive skip the line - line.

Deciding it would be better if we had a guide for our tour, we opted for an English speaking guide for the Colosseum, Palantine Hill and the Roman Forum. Andreaus, our guide for the Colosseum was an interesting fellow that seemed to obsess about minor details of the structure, sounding very much like a school teacher with a class full of distracted teenagers, rather than giving an overall picture of the incredible history of the Flavian Amphitheatre. After his guided lesson in stone masonry, we puddled our way through a well designed and informative static display on the 2nd storey.

David, our second guide for the Palantine Hill and Roman Forum was the exact opposite. Born in Rome, with an English mother, he had a decidedly English accent to his underlying Italian language. He was very entertaining as a guide, giving a "bigger picture" description of the area, mixed with personal anecdotes and one liners for the next 90 minutes. He openly admitted to only taking the job as a guide so he could promote his own evening walking tour of the "real" Roma!

Taking him up on his offer, we arranged to meet him at Trajan's Column at 5.30pm.

This walking tour turned out to be the highlight of our visit to Rome. David, ably assisted by his wife Christina, took us on a 3 hour walk through the back streets of Rome. This gave us a much better understanding of Rome' history.

At its peak, Rome had somewhere around 1.5 million inhabitants (1.2m today). After the fall of the empire and the rise of Christianity, it fell to as low as 5,000 - 10,000 inhabitants, this continued for centuries through the Dark and Medieval ages. Through continual flooding from the river Tiber, the ground level gradually rose due the sediment remaining after each flooding. Modern Rome is some 6m above the original ancient Rome street level.

There is quite literally a complete city below the entire city of Rome we see today. Anywhere there is any sort of excavation, they will find remnants of a Temple, market place or apartment block. Yes, apartment block! Ancient Roman housing was similar in style to the housing today, in fact, most of the buildings in Rome today are built on the remnants of structures from ancient Rome as the foundations are much stronger than the mud / silt from the river. Ancient Rome had apartments up to 7 stories high. Unlike today however, the best apartment was on the ground floor. Easier to get to water, no stairs and if there was a fire, of which there were many, you could walk out the front door.

We clambered down narrow tunnels under a church to reveal a maze of corridors and ancient alleys that would have been open air laneways in their day.

We wandered through the Jewish quarter. In ancient times, this was a gated (everyone locked in at night) community tolerated by the Romans. Curiously, Jews weren't allowed to own property in Rome, but they were allowed to lend money. On the other hand, Romans were allowed to own property, but were not allowed to lend money (borrow yes, lend no)… This situation made for some very wealthy Jewish citizens...

We came across a cat sanctuary in the middle of town, set up to control the tens of thousands of cats roaming the city. Coincidently, the biggest chinese restaurant in Rome is directly across the road. Not judging, just an observation...

On to the Pantheon and the amazing details of its construction. Built 1900 years ago, it incorporates features only found in modern building construction today. As Rome is prone to earthquakes (they are the reason 2/3 of the Colosseum collapsed), the Pantheon is built on two clay "dohnuts" designed to absorb vibrations. The walls have filled in arches designed to spread the load of the 43m wide dome onto 8 reinforced butresses. The oculus (the hole in the top of the dome) is a perfect circle and modern day engineers have calculated it is exactly the minimum size needed to support the dome and prevent it from collapsing. Just mind boggling stuff when you consider it was almost 2000 years ago...

I could go on and on, but suffice to say, we had a wonderful time.

Heading home, feet weary from the days trudging, we kept our eyes open long enough for Lauren to grab a triple scoop gelatto..