Decades-old paint rest on every wall, dusty ochres and russets that crackle and bake in the July heat. A city like sunset. Rome is hot, endless. A city of comically small cars, cars that park sideways with the motorcycles, cars like sardine cans with rolling top roofs you could stick your head out of if you liked. A city of four million visitors a year, fountains and cathedrals transformed into gladiators’ arenas of selfie sticks and tour guide flags; merchants, mopeds and taxis that mingle and flow together over ancient brick roads, a centuries-old tradition of chaos.
Despite the tourism it remains impressive. The statues’ marble dresses run like real fabric, the old Gods’ stone beards tangle and knot. The scale of the construction is humbling, how did they place such giant columns in a time before machinery, and so precisely! Once in place there was no “a little to the left”, they were there for forever, they are there to this day. Will anything we make still remain twenty-eight centuries from now?
I have one day to see it all, impossible. I wear out a pair of shoes on the cobblestones beating my way from the Colosseum to the Vatican and back and I still don’t know Rome, I will never know Rome. When do you know a place? When you know its history? Know the people? When your own story is woven into that of the community’s? What will we travelers know of the world, of its breadth and depth? More than anything I see nature and humans- beautiful, quirky, similar and different iterations of the same desires and passions: to grow, to create, to endure.
