Its our last full day in Rome and we are up for the challenge of the most famous ruins. We step outside at 10.30am and its already over 30degrees. We are armed with water, and hats and perhaps not enough sunscreen.

We metro to Circus Maximus and walk to the entry gates, and find no queue! We wander around the forum with a poor map and an audio commentary. Palatine Hill has a mixture of ruins from 800BC to the middle ages. They have some romulean hut ruins from 800BC, consistent with the story of Romulus and Remus and the beginning of Rome. Right next door was the house of Augustus, with spectacular Frescoes in brilliant colour, well preserved from 2nd century AD.

We drink copious amounts and refill constantly from the ever present springs. After the Palatine Hill we head to the Forum, which is a series of major ruins after complete destruction of most of the buildings. There is a very impressive collection of glasswares from the discovery of glass in 1AD.

Even hotter in the Forum and after much wandering on uneven bricks we retreated to the Colosseum. This was fascinating, of course, and I had assumed there would just be a dirt floor. Its amazing to see the series of underfloor passages and storage for the wild beasts and prisoners underneath the now missing floor area. The numbers of people who could be seated at the Colosseum varies from 150,000 to 50,000 depending on who's telling the story. After feeling we have won the battle of the heat, we head home at 2.30pm to the corner restaurant to share a simple pizza and 1.5l more of water/beer each!

In the evening Brett is all set to take me back to the Pantheon (as requested by me..) but in the end it seems sensible to eat nearby. 50m from the hotel door there are about 12 restaurants, and we have eaten at half of them. We select a new one, inside a circular building advertising a roof garden. It was humming up there with a group of waiter reminding me of Manuel off Fawlty Towers. We had lovely food and wine, both of us shared an antipasto, then had veal in gravy, roast potatoes, and a shared apple cake dessert. The wine was a Frascati, and we said farewell to Rome in style.