Ostia Antica Day Trip

Day 5: April 3, 2013

 

When originally planning our trip, we had wanted to take a day trip to Naples and Pompeii.  As I said before, that would have required at least 2 days, and we weren't sure we wanted to rush our way through Rome.  We wanted to relax and really enjoy it.  Although we didn't rush, we still had two entire days in which we could do as we pleased.  Chris had scoped out a few day trips that we could potentially take.  Ostia Antica was one of them.  When we left the Vatican on the 2nd, we thought we'd look into taking a couple of tours for the following days.  That way we didn't have to think about the details, like, how were we going to get there?

After looking around and finding two places which offered tours we were interested in, we decided we didn't want to pay the mark-up fee.  Sure, they got you there and the ticket covered your entrance fee, but they also dictated how much time you had at the various locations.  Lunch was not included either.  Roughly, we were looking at 50 Euros a piece for each of the tours we wanted to do.  Ostia Antica was by far the easier of the two to get to, and it cost about 4 Euros for the metro rides, and 10 Euros for the entrance fee.  Done!

We spent about 4 hours wandering around the site.  I'm pretty sure we didn't see all of it.  There were a lot of fun little hidey-holes to discover.  It was probably the sunniest day we were in Italy, and I didn't have any sunscreen.  Needless to say, I got a little bit of a sunburn!  We wandered out into the little town for some pizza and wine once we had enough adventure.  I got the pizza while he got the wine.  We sat in a little square and watched the locals while we ate.  It was lovely.

The excerpt below is from the Ostia Antica Tourist Guide:

 

A short history of Ostia

The ancient Roman city of Ostia was in antiquity situated at the mouth of the river Tiber, some 30 kilometres to the west of Rome. The shoreline moved seawards, due to silting, from the Middle Ages until the 19th century. Therefore Ostia is today still lying next to the Tiber, but at a distance of some three kilometres from the beach. Ostia is Latin for "mouth", the mouth of the Tiber. The river was used as harbour, but in the Imperial period two harbour basins were added to the north, near Leonardo da Vinci airport. Thatharbour district was called Portus, Latin for "harbour".