The next day, after exploring Florence and seeing the famous Dome (no pictures because I accidently left my camera at the hotel!), I took another train to the port of Livorno and got a cab to board the ship.
Hotel Eliseo was delightful, and the view from my hotel window was great! It looked over a lovely park -- that wall is about 2,000 years old.
The main thing I wanted to see in Rome was the Coliseum.
Like Pompeii, I just wanted to be where people had lived and worked and played thousands of years ago.
I wandered and explored for several hours, and enjoyed it immensely. And I got a picture to add to my collection of examples showing why people who are blind shouldn't rely on the railing to know when the stairs end.
The guidebook said that the ruins of Palatine Hill, with its palatial dwellings and the Forum (all of which are next to the Coliseum) are very picturesque, with roses, moss and poppies growing amid the crumbling bricks and marble.
I was very disappointed that they were closed because of a strike.
Well, you probably already know what it had to be and are asking "How could you be so dumb, Dona?" but I didn't realize until I got off the train and followed everyone to . . . what else would be in a city built on water (well actually it's built on more than 100 islands in the Venetian Lagoon)? A boat! More precisely, a BUS BOAT, traveling along the Grand Canal!
I'll share a map of Venice here, and you can click here for a great photograph of the city.
Both show the Grand Canal slicing through Venice in the shape of a large backwards "S," with lots of smaller canals leading from it and intersecting the streets/alleys.
Venice is in the middle of a lagoon in the Mediterranean Sea -- you can't see it, but just off the map, both ends of the Grand Canal open into the lagoon which surrounds the city.
The train station where I arrived are those chunks of white in the upper left corner of the map, just before the Grand Canal reaches the lagoon.
That was a great plan until I realized it involved going over a bridge with lots of stairs.
I started to haul my suitcases up but it was very slow and impossible to keep up with him
(there's a great video from "Venice for Visitors" showing people hauling heavy luggage through the streets of Venice and over the bridges).
Ah, what a wonderful place Hotel Becher was! I had a lovely room with a window overlooking one of the canals.
The picture below shows me on the bridge just outside my window (it's to the left of me).
Through the window I saw one gondola after another drift by, each boatman ducking to get under the bridge.
It kinda reminded me of a ride in Disneyland -- a canal with rows of sightseeing boats slowly cruising by picturesque buildings.
Once through the tunnel I entered a huge plaza, my destination -- the picture to the right was taken after I got halfway across it and turned around to face where I had just come from.
I sat and had a drink of water in the shade while imagining what life must have been like for the Jews who had to live here hundreds of years ago (their confinement didn't end until Napoleanic times).
Although the guidebook said there are not many Jews living here now, I watched a boy who was wearing a yamaka playing with a young man, I forget whether they were throwing a ball or what.
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Now, after you saw all those little canals with all those bridges (with more than 400 of those bridges in the city, you can't get very far without having to navigate at least one of them!), I know what you're thinking: "Dona, how the heck do people in wheelchairs get around Venice, with all these bridges with stairs every which way?"
