We think we have antiques in America??

On Tuesday, after a weekend of strolling the streets of Ariccia, we boarded the bus at 7:30am sharp to head north towards Rome. I love our bus driver, Ezio. If the traffic is bad, he makes his own road, usually down what looks like someones driveway. The crazy thing is, there are no dead ends here (or that I've seen) so the road is bound to lead us somewhere. He honks while we are speeding down the narrow roads incase there is another car coming the opposite way. We always get to where we are headed, I'm not sure if he gets us there faster by taking the detours, but we never sit in traffic!
We stopped at an Etruscan burial site. It was erie to imagine that these tombs were built seven thousand years before Jesus was born. The inscriptions above the doors were legible (not in a language, but you could make out the inscriptions).
Some tombs were ornate, some were very plain.. the ornamentation was a sign of wealth. Some tombs had marble chairs carved into the wall, some had a "bed" and a pillow of marble.
The were cold, and damp. They smelled like dirt and it felt like death. The only sign of life was the awkward shiny green of the ivy and creeping weeds whose that clashed with the browny blah color of the mud/dirt/sand/rock.
We were the only people there, just us and the tombs. and if you've seen one, you've, for the most part, seen them all. So we loaded the bus and headed for Ostia Antica, where the ancient roman ruins are. They, on the other hand, showed signs of life, even though they were 3000 years "newer" than the tombs. I think they date somewhere around 2000 BC but I could be totally wrong.
It was amazing to see what the built with their bare hands and a few tools they constructed. The massive columns, the arches, the ampatheater, and the baths seem so "easy" to us because we have machines to do all of the work.
But to think that they created these columns to be perfectly circular meant every move of carving had to be precise. The whole town was very though out, and you could tell where their shops were by the mosaics that were carefully made outside of each structure with images of what was sold their. I think the town was about 2 miles long, but we just walked half of it because we were starving. While we were there, it was hard to grasp how old these ruins were, and how they were once underground until someone noticed a little protursion of brick in a field. Little by little the entire thing was excavated... amazing.
Afterwards, we headed to the town of Ostia, which is on the coast of the Mediterranean. We grabbed a piece of pizza and walked to the pier in the center of town so we could see the beach and the water. It is so neat to see the little terracotta villas lining the coast.
They even have the umbrella guys with their muscles and tank tops and leathered skin and chairs to rent. We are spoiled in Alabama with the prettiest beaches in the world. The sand in Ostia was brown and grainy and shelly, and every hand-full of sand had a cigarrette butt to counter it. We may have been in a lesser area, so after next weekend on our trip to Sorrento and Capri, I can make a better judgement, but home sweet home may be the prettiest. Maybe this is ignorant, but I doubt I could ever think any other way.