We love it when guests who have taken our tours blog about it! Surfing the net we came across the newlywed's ‘Mr. & Mrs. Library’s’ blog. They recently took our Skip the Line: Colosseum & Ancient Rome Tour with our guide Damiano. What follows is an excerpt from their blog post about their experience on this tour, complete with candid photos to tell the tale:

Ciao Bella!: Honeymoon Day 2

With some sleep into our systems (but not nearly enough!), we started out early to go to our half-day walking tour of the Colosseum and Ancient Rome. We had scheduled this before leaving the US, and let me tell you, it was well worth the money.

We met our tour group right outside of the Colosseum. When we booked, we didn’t have a choice in tour companies, but we had nothing to fear. The Dark Rome tour group is organized, professional, and very well put together. We were added to the red dot group, given headset devices so we could hear the tour guide no matter where we were in the group, and then introduced to our guide. His name was Damiano, and he told us to follow the red umbrella through the crowds. [...] In short, he was fabulous […]

Damiano started us off with a tour through the Colosseum. If you are ever in Rome, you must do a tour through it. Sure, you could tour it yourself, but the information that an expert like Damiano can give was priceless. There are no signs in the Colosseum that talk about what kinds of animals the Romans imported to fight, like tigers, bears, and, yes, hippos. Plus, they had a full system of trapped doors under the stage to bring up props. Didn’t know that, did you? We went inside and outside of all of the areas tourists are allowed to go in. It was great! The stairs were ultra steep, but the Romans weren’t known for handicap accessibility. The engineering it must have taken to build such a structure is just incredible.

Rome is basically on two giant hills with a valley in between. No matter where you go, you must climb at least five flights of stairs. At the top of our five flights of stairs was this palace and its garden. […] We then kept walking through more of the ruins. Churches, Pagan churches, places to burn bodies like Caesar’s, market places, there was everything. When you see bricks, you must think of it covered in marble. Marble was taken away from these places a while ago to be used elsewhere, but it was the covering for almost all important surfaces.

After our tour ended, we decided to walk and see where we ended up. Now, this probably sounds risky, but in the middle of the day in the middle of Rome, there’s nothing to it. It’s one of the best ways to spend your time and see what’s really going on […]

This is just an edited excerpt. You can read the full blog post here

If you’d like to take our Skip the Line: Colosseum & Ancient Rome Tour click here. If you’d like to take a full day tour that incorporates some of the sites that the newlyweds saw on their own after the tour, check out our Skip the Line: Full Day Ancient Rome Tour.

All photos and blog text courtesy of Erin Holden.