And it only took ten years to see it!
We were last in Rome in 1999, at the tail end of a tenth anniversary trip to Italy which had already included weeklong stops in Venice and Umbria. So the schedule in the Eternal City back then was going to be pretty tight, not much more than a full day available to us before we would hop a flight back to San Francisco. Not enough time to see anything in any depth, but enough time to take in a couple of highlights: the Spanish Steps, St. Peter's Basilica, the Colosseum.
Except for one problem: after a morning jaunt which took us past the first two and a stop for a bite to eat, we had just the late afternoon left to us for the last stop. And Eileen's feet hurt. "I need to go back to the hotel and rest for a bit," she said, and being the exceptionally sensitive and caring spouse that I am, I acquiesced. Only slightly grudgingly.
"A bit" turned into "a bit plus a nap" (that's a bit in a half, if you're keeping track) and we finally launched ourselves out the door shortly before the sun started to set — thinking, based on the closing time listed in the guidebooks, that we would have at least an hour to explore the site. Oops! Turns out that ticket sales end an hour before closing time, something we hadn't recognized. Which meant we arrived at the Colosseum just in time to have the gates swung shut in our face by a friendly guard telling us, "tomorrow, tomorrow." Except for us, there was no tomorrow.
Ever since, Eileen has been dining out on the anecdote of how she denied me a visit to the Colosseum (it also works well as a two-fer with the anecdote about our finding the Louvre closed the one chance we had to visit it on a trip to Paris), an anecdote which (as countless dinner companions over the decade can attest) allows me to sigh heavily and play the role of the victim.
And there's your capsule explanation for why we've undertaken this journey over the past nine months: we both needed new material.
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