9-26 When in Rome - Roman Ruins

 There are a couple of  reasons why we stayed in Lido di Ostia for our last three nights in Italy.  One is to check out the Lido's on this side of Italy.  Another is to be close to the airport for our Saturday morning departure to Spain and the last is to see Ostia Antica.  

It would have only been about a  5 minute car ride from the parking lot - if we had not got turned around and if we had not missed the Ostia Antica parking lot the first time around.  Instead it took about 10 minutes.  

This place is humongous!  We spent about three hours there - and did not see even half of it.  I think we hit most  of the high lights though.  As you would expect I took almost 200 photos - I got it down to 103.  I will do 3 posts because I like to document our travels.  Anyone reading this is free to skip around - or ignore completely if you find it boring!

The Roman road leading to Ostia Antica.

There are at least two entrances to Ostia Antica.  The parking lot we found started us off in the mausoleum section.

There are a lot of sarcophaguses and pieces of stuff.

I thought the brick work was interesting.  I am not sure if this area was repaired many times and that is why different materials were used - or if it was intentional.

Lots of headless, footless statuary.  Anything complete is most likely in a museum somewhere.

This looked like an oven to me.

This original signage did not make it to a museum as it is too damaged.

I took many pictures of descriptions and what they thought it looked like originally - along with what the ruins look like now.  It must have been amazing back then.

These remains are of warehouses - the river Tiber has moved from its original meandering location from BC.  So you have to imagine what it was like then.

There was an amazing number of frescos left to slowly destroy in nature.  

A picture of what happened here in the warehouse area.

This was an immense city of about 60,000 people.  One of the things that is mentioned often is the salt flats in the area.  There was no refrigeration - so preserving foods especially meats with salt was very important.

These were store fronts - see photo below.

Next we come to the apartments - which were 3 stories high.

As I mentioned - there are so many of these tiled floors.

Dolphins are featured in a lot of them.  Especially in the bath areas.  

We come to the end of Part 1 of Ostia Antica!