Man On The Run

One day of our Roman holiday, we found ourselves in search of a wireless hotspot so that email and such could get sync'd up. After all, there is work to be done.

It ended up we found a free WiFi zone at the Pantheon McDonald's. The Pantheon is a major landmark and is considered by many to be the best example of Roman architecture still standing. It also shares its square with a McDonald's. It was built as a temple to the many gods of the Romans (pantheon literally means something like 'temple of all gods') around 125AD. As is often the case in Rome, this temple was built on top of another temple that was even older. Sometime after 600AD, the Christians got their hands on it and made it into a church. The amazing feature of the thing is the domed roof that stands even in modern day as the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world -- it weighs in at 5000 tons. Those crazy Romans did all this without cranes, calculators, or the Internet.

One of the biggest blights on Rome was the ever-present street vendors selling fake designer handbags and sunglasses. It is actually illegal to buy a bag from these guys. I had time to kill whilst my better half was working so I was walking around snapping some pictures. Most of the action centered around the fountain in the middle of the square. Then entered the first attack wave of the carabiniere (Rome's quasi-military police force -- many of these guys carry machine guns.) The street vendors grabbed their goods and took off running. The police chased them away and out of sight.

Moments later, many of the same vendors cautiously returned to the square. Some new vendors arrived to fill in the freed space for the ones who didn't make it back. Minutes later, another wave of carabiniere rode through on motorcycles and again the cycle repeated. This happened over and over in the 20-30 minutes that I was standing there, zoom lens in hand.

To protect the not-so-innocent, I have fuzzed a lot of the images so that faces aren't as clear but you should still get the idea.