My first visit to the Colosseum...

Magnificent does not even begin to capture the majesty of this construction and I am so pleased that I eventually made the trip. My book on Marcus Tullius Cicero always takes me to a place where I wonder what the site was like when he stood there and now I was able to imagine hundreds of acres of ponds, marshes, dykes and fields to the east of the forum and the Palatine Hill, a place that was being improved and absorbed as a suburb into Republican Rome. After Cicero's death, long after in fact, Nero would build his Golden Palace here, with its own lakes and then Vespasian would knock that down and create the Colosseum. Just incredible to walk where Cicero had once been.