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The Colosseum in Rome: Bruce, Chuck, Nate, and Me

This is a recap of a trip a few days ago — vis­it­ing the (most very awe­some) Colos­seum in Rome. It was dou­bly awe­some because they had a spe­cial dis­play going on about Glad­i­a­tors — awesome!

On our way from our hotel, we stopped off at some ruins just sit­ting there in the mid­dle of town. No mark­ings, noth­ing — just fenced off and set apart for pro­tec­tion — but oth­er­wise, pretty unboth­ered. We looked around for a sign, and finally found one that explained that is was orig­i­nally the most famous Glad­i­a­to­r­ial train­ing school in Rome, Mag­nus Ludus or some such name — and it was so well posi­tioned that it had it’s own spe­cial under­ground con­nec­tor to the Colos­seum a few hun­dred yards away. Nate thought that was pretty awe­some (espe­cially when I started talk­ing about imag­in­ing Glad­i­a­tors in each of the rooms, some­times bleed­ing, some­times get­ting ready for great bat­tle — all of them train­ing in a big way). He though that was pretty intense — onward to the Colosseum.

On our approach, we decided to sign up for one of the tours — which was a good idea. We learned a lot about the build­ing (Flavian’s Amphithe­ater, to be exact), and while inter­est­ing — it’d just be blather to fill this blog with fac­toids from the tour (like, did you know that most Glad­i­a­tors actu­ally didn’t fight to the death until the mid­dle ages of the Empire? They were pro­fes­sional enter­tain­ers, never crim­i­nals, never against their will — they were incred­i­bly highly paid per­form­ers — like pro­fes­sional athletes).

We walked around, took a bunch of cool pic­tures — but the high­light was that we all wanted to set up a shot to do homage to one of the most impor­tant moments in mod­ern Colos­seum Glad­i­a­to­r­ial con­tests … the face-off between Chuck Nor­ris and Bruce Lee. So we went look­ing for places to take the shot — and finally found some­thing some­what close (if you watch the actual movie, you’ll real­ize it’s all set — there doesn’t seem to be any­thing actu­ally filmed on site … maybe one shot — but that seems a stretch, to go all the way to Rome for one shot).

So, here is the orig­i­nal face-off picture:

…which is actu­ally not any­where real in the Colos­seum — but with the magic of (very rough) Pho­to­shop — we were able to take this orig­i­nal photo (shot at the actual Colos­seum with two incred­i­bly fierce warriors):

…and make it a bit more of an homage by doing this:

…and finally — for a bit more of the action

…per­son­ally, I think the san­dals add a cer­tain glad­i­a­to­r­ial je ne sais quoi — wouldn’t you say?

…and yes … there IS a pic­ture of me with my shirt off in the Colos­seum, but you’ll never see it (Kathy made me do it to match Chuck)