The Hour Before the Gladiators Wake

A week in Italy has gone by at the precise moment the world seemingly decides to do the same. Rome and Positano, peak season, peak heat, peak everyone-else. And I did it the way you do it when you’re travelling with a big group of families: fully, consciously, into the tourist traps. The Colosseum at midday. The queues. The €5 water. The man doing push ups outside the oval arena that used to host the fiercest fighters the world knew and turned into a place where many stop 3 times to catch their breath on the uneven sets of stairs. I stepped into all of it on purpose, because that’s what the trip was, and it takes a particular peace in surrendering to the fact that today you are going to be one of four thousand people doing exactly the same thing in the same square.

Over the years I’ve figured out a way to combine the strong desire of being active with being a tourist. Because every one of those days, before any of it started, I’d already seen the city and filled my cup. Alone. At an hour the gladiators were still asleep.

My favourite way to see a place has never once let me down: get up at six, when it’s a few degrees cooler and the light is giving you the first hint of what kind of morning it will be, and go for a run. At that hour the only other people out are the deliriously jetlagged - Americans mostly, wandering wide-eyed, hoping for an early Italian espresso to help their own body clocks and the occasional local walking a dog with the expression of someone who is used to seeing this every summer.

The city you get at six is a lot more like the city in the brochure. The shops are shut. The scooters haven’t started. The light hits the same buildings everyone photographs at noon, except now there’s nobody standing in front of them, and the stone looks the way it must have looked for most of the last two thousand years before someone invented the selfie stick.

The only preparation it takes is planning the route the evening before. Twenty minutes with a map and a bit of curiosity. Roadworks often throw in a little surprise but have lead to seeing some gems you would have otherwise missed. It’s distinctly different to finding a spot to run some intervalls - you’re building a sightseeing tour that happens to be a run. Where’s the famous thing? Good, it goes in the route. What’s between here and there that I’ve never heard of? Even better, that goes in too. The best discoveries are often the streets you didn’t mean to find.

One morning that route was the Via Appia - one of the oldest original Roman roads, paved with the actual stones, running out of the city the way it has for over two millenia. Running on it at dawn, with the cypresses and the broken tombs and absolutely nobody else, is the kind of thing you cannot buy, book, or queue for. It is simply there, for free, if you’re willing to set an alarm.

Social media does sometimes help! After a few messages of people hinting the later history, it turns out those same stones hosted one of the great moments in the sport.

The 1960 Olympic marathon finished here in Rome, run in the evening to dodge the heat, the last stretch lit by soldiers holding torches. A then unknown Ethiopian called Abebe Bikila ran the whole thing barefoot, because the shoes he’d been given gave him blisters, so he took them off. He led down the Appian Way in the dark, broke clear in the final 500 metres, and became the first Black African to win Olympic gold. He even had to dodge a stray scooter in the last 60 metres, which is the most Roman detail imaginable and makes me feel better about every scooter that has nearly ended me since.

The setting twisted the knife beautifully. He made his decisive move beside the Obelisk of Axum, which the Italians had hauled back to Rome after invading Ethiopia in 1936 - winning his country’s first gold on foreign stone taken from his own. You couldn’t script it.

I knew none of that as I ran the Appia at dawn. I just tried to not break my ankles on the gigantic cobbles. I’ve sometimes found a city hands you these things for free, if you go at the right hour and stay curious enough to look them up later.

Running is the one thing nobody has worked out how to charge you for. No ticket, no queue, no upsell. You see more of the actual city in a 6am hour on foot than you do in a full day of paid attractions, and you arrive back at the hotel for breakfast having already had the best part of the day before the rest of the group has found their other shoe.

By the time you read this I’ll be back in Germany, swapping the cobbles for a long flat day on the bike - 180km from Munich to Roth. As you can see, any excuse to be outdoors is good enough for me and hopefully you too. Have a great weekend,

Jan.