OK, Day 2 and now for something completely different. Came across this Pythonesque scene at the Colosseum a few weeks ago and thought it captured the randomness of ancient sites sitting in contemporary context. Can't size the image (so apologies to those who are still waiting for it to load), but found moving the image back and forth to view it created a sort of animation which forced the Roman soldiers onto the rather bewildered tourist in a kind of timecrunch, as I like to call it. I like the fact that in the background there is a protest of some kind, banners draped from the ancient monument, and people waiting for buses (as I was) and mooching about generally. There is an nice tension between the action of the costumed soldiers and the static pose of the tourist...

Guidebooks to Rome are a breed apart. Just when you thought it was impossible to produce another take on this city up comes "The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code", spawned from the Dan Brown novel which, as a one-room bookseller in Rome said to me, "pays my rent", to the quirkier and perhaps more comfortably ingested "Insider's Guide to Rome" (Robson Books, London, 2004) by Times journalist, Nick Wyke. http://www.batsford.com/book/1861057210

Nick spent four years living in the city, not far from where I now live, in fact, and his warm and generous insights include essays on the "Gladiators' School", "Talking Statues" and a wonderful, if not surreal, opera walk, in which one visits the sites of Puccini's "Tosca" - Sant'Andrea della Valle, Palazzo Farnese, and Castle Sant'Angelo - while listening to the work on a personal stereo (Nick suggests the 1953 performance at La Scala featuring Maria Callas but he isn't proud: "...a euro 5 version from the music stall at Campo de'Fiori market will do nicely").

It is more than an aural and visual feast: "Turn left out of Piazza Biscone into Campo de Fiori. Here you can assemble a Tosca picnic based on what fans have speculated was inside Cavaradossi's lunch basket....Just for the record Scarpia's lavish last supper (in Act Two) would have commenced with a tray of small appetisers, such as prosciutto wrapped in colourful marzipan, savoury tartlets of nuts and greens, and small fritters of sweetbreads, or perhaps, oysters. He might have had capon broth with tiny ravioli stuffed with capon breast, cheese, cinnamon, nutmeg, marrow and herbs, followed by a roasted whole fish filled with truffles, or a hare in a sweet and sour sauce. This would have been greedily succeeded by a spit-roast lamb. Dessert would have consisted of a sort of layered ice-cream cake with tiny biscuits and marzipan petits fours, all washed down with a sweet mahogany coloured Olorosa sherry from Spain". Now, there's a challenge.

I'll come back to Nick's book at a later date; just flagging it up now as a fine example of encountered past.