Ancient Rome part 3

So now we are headed to Paletine Hill, the place where the huge Imperial Palace was located. It is mostly gone wit only a few features for your to see. One is the Stadium. It is approx. 500 feet long and may have been used as a race track. It held gardens and walking paths also. This was a fountain:

That's really about it for the good pitcures on Palentine Hill. We also stopped by the small museum there and saw mosaic floors, statues and other artifacts excavated from the site. From there we walked to Trajan's Market which was closed by that time. Rome peaked under Trajan's rule in 98-117 AD, the empire stretched from SCotland to the Sahara and from Spain to the Fertile Cresent. He extended the Forum with this area which contained temples, law courts, squares lines with shops and a monumental column. The Market area held shopping space, warehouse and administrative offices. It was very popular.

He also erected this Column that used to have abronze statue of himself on top, now it is St. Peter. Hard to get a good picture of it:

Next we battled the late afternoon traffic of Rome to find the Pantheon. Here's a picture outside.
It was hard to get a good picture of the inside and the light was not the best but here's a picture of the inside of the dome looking straight up.

In this picture you can see all the people and the pretty marble floor.
After visiting the Pantheon we sat down for our daily dose of gellato! Then we walked the streets doing a little shopping and mostly just checking out the people. Tons of people out and about in the evening. We were slowly making our way to the metro stop. We stopped at Trevi Fountain:
There were so many people crowded around it it was hard to get a picture of it from the front. After seeing the fountain we finally went back to our campground, ate dinner, showered and fell into bed. It had been a LONG day. We saw almost all of Anciant Rome in one day!