Amazingly, no problems getting bikes to Italy. The boxes were untouched, and after about two hours we had the bikes together and took them down the stairs, fully loaded with double panniers, where signs indicated we would find the train. What awaited was two flights of stairs up — it was an underpass. We thought about it and put the loaded bikes carefully on the escalator. Nothing bad happened.

Then we bought tickets for a different train than the one we actually took but I think the conductor simply didn’t want to deal with a couple of non-italian speakers, especially with the bikes, so he punched the tickets and let us alone. Another bit of luck got us off at the right station and to our Air BnB spot. Yay! Here’s hoping this luck holds!

Today we went to the Coliseum and Palatine Hill and the Roman forums and wandered around. That stuff is amazing for its age and all but what I ended up thinking about was not how it was in some gilded past, but how it has changed.

Near the forum, a sign informed us that the stone paved street we stood on, Via Nova, had been built over the ruins of a house. The coliseum was built over what had been an artificial and decorative lake Nero had built. In the Palatino area, windows had obviously been bricked over in centuries past as many places as walls had been rebuilt in the last hundreds years. One of the displays in the Colosseum described a massive fire, after which a new neighborhood was built on top of four meters of rubble. The restoration work for the benefit of twenty-first century tourism is only the most recent of more than two thousand years of remodeling. In another half millennium, it may become something new again.