Poor Felix has been at home with a rheumy fever since Thursday night. He sounds pathetic, but he’s on the mend. Even so, when his friend came by on Friday afternoon, the farthest I could get him was the courtyard to tell her that he couldn’t play -- then he wanted to run back inside and recline. Alaina has also been under the weather, but not quite so pitiable. (Under the weather is a distinctly odd phrase, as Connie points out. It must come from a place where the weather is usually horrid and something you wouldn’t want to be under. Maybe it’s from Boston.)

I spent part of the morning walking around the racecourse at the best-preserved stadium in Rome, outside the walls along the via Appia Antica. Its state of preservation is evident in this picture, but the map doesn’t really convey how fun it is to walk half a mile around an old racecourse.

Rome gives the impression that stadiums were pretty cheaply built -- probably a lot like arenas and ballparks today. Of the two in the center of Rome, the Circus Maximus is just an oval field with quite a bit of trash in it but essentially no ruins, and the stadium of Domitian is entirely built over as the piazza Navona. (At the north end, behind the buildings, you can see excavations of the original stadium.)

The via Appia Antica is a strange thing. It runs southeast from the city, and it ends up being one of the longest roads in Italy. The first section, right by the gate through the Roman wall, is narrow, walled, and essentially unwalkable on days when the busses and cars can pass. But further sections are lined with a mix of swish villas and ancient tombs, closed to most traffic, and in parts even paved with the original basalt slabs. I walked a fair way along it, then headed off on a dirt road toward the 1930s section of Rome called EUR.

There is no real correlation between the age of the city and the degree to which green space has been preserved within it. Rome is just full of green space, and the spread outside the walls along the via Appia Antica is notable more for not being a park but rather largely developed farmland than for its greenness. London is old and full of green. Vancouver is new and even greener. Tokyo is almost parkless by comparison.

There’s also clearly a difference between urban green space and something that feels rural within a city. There are milk cows along the via Appia Antica, reminding me of the goose farms in the Mai Po marshes and fish ponds at the end of Hong Kong’s New Territories, or even of the Pulau Ubin rural island that Singapore carefully preserves, lacking any other rural land.

Once again, having a good map and a cellphone served well. Except in the metro (whose fault is this, guys? Pretty pathetic, not putting up repeaters and cells in the tunnels), I’ve had good GSM coverage everywhere in Rome. I could text message to rave about what I was seeing, check in on my sniffly family, and still find my long way back to a bus route. The paper map is still a lot better than either Live maps or Google maps on a cellphone display -- it has much higher resolution, it is readable in direct sunlight, and it lists the bus routes.

Oh, good shoes help, too.