16　A Bad Beginning

Have you ever heard of the Seven-League Boots,the boots in which one could take many miles at a single step?

Well,there is a still bigger boot；it is over five hundred miles long,and it is in the Mediterranean Sea.

No,it's not a real boot,but it would look like one if you were miles high in an airplane and looking down upon it.

It is called Italy.

Something very important happened in Italy,not long after the First Olympiad in Greece. It was so important that it was called the Year 1，and for a thousand years people counted from it as the Greeks did from the First Olympiad and as we do now from the birth of Christ.This thing that happened was not the birth of a man,however.It was the birth of a city,and this city was called Rome.

The history of Rome starts with stories that we know are fairy tales or myths in the same way that the history of Greece does.Homer told about the wanderings of the Greek,Odysseus.A great many years later a poet named Virgil told about the wanderings of a