Ostia antica

I had a busy day yesterday. I left Claudio and Albertina's place in Milan at 8. I think I enjoyed this accommodation the most. Clean quiet comfortable bed and I found it very enjoyable chatting with Claudio whose English was very good. This was probably the most that I interacted with an Italian on the entire trip.

I made it to the train station on the trolley car. I love trolley cars. I caught my 9 o'clock first class train to Rome. I have decided to splurge on up grading train tickets. For an extra 10 Euros one gets a much pleasanter experience and half the seats are empty. It was a 3 hour train ride from Milan to Rome. There is a moniter showing the speed and when we were outside urban areas we were doing 250 k/ hour.

I decided to spend my last night of the trip in Ostia Antica a community on the coast where the Tiber river flows into the Mediterranean. Ostia Antica is right by the airport and is also the location of a significant archeological site also known as Ostia Antica. In Roman times Ostia was the main port for Rome. Goods would be off loaded from ships in the Med into warehouses before being moved upriver on smaller vessels. It had been a very prosperous town. Unfortunately it's harbour silted up at the end of the 4th century and with the collapse of the Roman empire it had been abandoned to slowly be covered by silt with yearly floodings of the Tiber. It was rediscovered and excavated in the 19th century to reveal a beautiful bricked city preserved to the first and some second stories. It would appear that Roman buildings were typically 4 stories tall. The upper stories were probably mined for bricks as they hadn't been buried in silt. Walking around the site gave a reasonable feeling for what it was like living in a Roman city. Many floor mosaics were preserved and some wall paintings. They had many drawings of what the buildings in their intact state would have appeared like. They had a beautiful amphitheatre. I wandered around for three hours partly using an audio guide and partly using the posted signs to reconstruct life in the Roman era.

I caught a bus back to Fumicinio where I am actually staying and had supper in with groceries from a local grocery store. It had been a long day. Fumicinio seemed a little more rougher and blue collar than Milan. My Air BnB was good. Clean quiet comfortable bed.Read more