Michelangelo designed a very handsome plaza surrounded by buildings on three sides. The Senate building is in the center facing the staircase leading up to the plaza. Today it houses Rome's city hall. Behind the building, largely inaccessible, is the Tarpeian Rock, a big cliff overlooking the Forum, where criminals would be thrown to their death before the Romans built the Colosseum and devised more fun ways to kill people. Flanking the Senate on both sides is the Capitoline Museum, housing one of Italy's best sculpture collections. There are lots of odd bits and pieces of obviously larger than life pieces from ancient Rome, as well as many rooms dedicated to the more subtle charms of Renaissance sculpture. It started to rain while we were here, one of the few rainy days of our whole trip, so we spent quite a bit of time here. But it's well worth it, both for the beauty of the collection and the buildings housing it. And if you're bored by the museums, he piazza has fantastic views over the rooftops of Rome

A twelfth century monk writing the history of Rome wrote passionately about the political dramas and intrigue that took place on Capitoline Hill, the center of the universe, home of the senate etc etc. Of course none of this was true, as that all took place in the Forum, and the Capitoline Hill had only one real function, holding the main state temple to Jupiter, where the emperor would come to perform rituals. Nonetheless, the monk had a good PR agent, and it became firmly established that Capitoline Hill was in fact the seat of government, giving the world, obviously, the word capitol. It also convinced the medieval Romans that they should re-establish their government seat on the Capitoline, so, accidentally, it did become the Roman capitol. They enlisted the services of Michelangelo to design the whole government complex, which housed the new Roman senate. Like the ancient senate of Rome, the institution rarely accomplished anything since the city was firmly under the thumb of the pope, but it did give old people a place to talk.

We then moved on to the most atmospheric part of Rome, the ancient Roman forum. This huge area is a jumble of ruins from various centuries, picturesquely overgrown with trees in parts. This was the center of the world for a thousand years, where the Senate determined the fate of the world, and the all the world's goods could be bought and sold in the markets. When Rome moved from republic to empire, the forum became less important, as the emperors' palace up the hill became the center of power and the Senate just a place for old men to talk. Commerce too moved out to Trajan's newer shopping mall, leaving the forum as a huge tourist attraction even in ancient times, full of souvenir stands, fortune tellers and prostitutes (even in the ruins today there's a road market out for male prostitutes from northern Italy).

The forum sits in the valley between the Palatine Hill, where the emperors lived, and Capitoline hill, where the city's chief temple sat and where the emperor had to go frequently to attend to his ceremonial duties. We have unfortunately lost the coolest ancient site ever, unfortunately, which was a huge bridge connecting the Palatine and Capitoline hills, which shot straight over the whole Forum, enabling the emperors to walk from home to the shrine without ever having to go through the human zoo below.