Palatino by night

After going to the pub for some reunion beers, my friends Tom and Fede took me to the heart of Rome, for a very unique (although not 100% legal) tour of the city's ancient ruins. They showed me how the ruins of central Rome seem to have almost no security at night: all they have is fences; and these proved to be ridiculously easy to climb over. Apparently, Italy simply has so many ancient ruins and archaeological parks, that they can't be bothered to provide proper guards or patrols for any of them. This was fine with me: it allowed my friends to show me ancient Rome in a much more cool way than most tourists see it; and seeing the ruins at night has a certain beauty and eerieness to it that you just don't get during the sunlit, tourist-infested daytime.

The three of us started by climbing over a few (rather low) fences, and by then climbing a long set of stairs inside an ancient and abandoned church. Tom and Fede showed me how you can get all the way onto the roof of this church, and to climb to the top of one of its chimneys. I told you these guys were crazy — they're no different in the ruins of their home city, than they are on the loco rapids of Ecuador's jungle rivers! Anyway, the view from the top of this church was gorgeous: we could see all of the Palatino (ancient central Rome) spread out below us; and it was quite enchanting in its shroud of darkness, with modern Rome encroaching on it from all sides.

Following that, we climbed back down to ground level, and jumped a few more fences to get inside the Palatino itself. Once inside, we were free to wander around the darkened ruins for quite a while. We managed to get all the way to the other side of the ruins — in semi-darkness — and to climb back down out of them with the aid of some maintenance ladders. The fences on the exit side were a bit tougher to surmount — they were quite high, and not made to be messed with — but we worked out a strategy for scaling them, and scale them we did. Boy, it was one hell of an adventure — still not sure if I actually did it, as it feels like a weird, surreal kind of dream!

Note: this event may or may not have actually happened. This blog post cannot be used against me in a court of law. If anyone tries to press charges on me for trespassing, my claim is that I simply wrote this blog post as an imaginative but purely fictional fantasy, for the benefit of entertaining my readers and of adding a bit of spice to the site. :P