all weekends lead to rome

I have a hunch that you could live in Rome for years and years and never quite see everything. I also bet that Rome never really feels wander-able; that it's a difficult place for whims and flights of fancy. That when a city is consistently packed with tourists, as Rome is, it demands a certain amount of focus and planning. Otherwise you'll simply be swept away... by the crowds, by the sights, by the unrelenting sun and equally unrelenting stampede of history.

Rome is a crazed Disney Land of sights to which a million little umbrella sticks topped with scarves march daily. These umbrella sticks (minus the umbrella) are the batons of the tour guides, leading legions of tourists in every direction, filling every crack and every corner. You rarely hear Italian spoken, you're more likely to hear English; and Spanish (with a heavy Catalan accent) was the second most popular language on our weekend. We're used to Milan where if you hear English on the street, your head spins to find the source. In Rome, it's the Italian that's fleeting.



But the sights... how to describe their ubiquitous presence? The well-worn phrase, "an embarrassment of riches" doesn't do this city justice. Everywhere is SOMEwhere. Everything is SOMEthing. And it's all so much older than anything we as Americans have regular contact with. It's hard to put it in perspective. It's hard to picture the Romans filling the Colloseum all the way to the rafters and screaming at the bloodied gladiators on the floor below. But they did. It's hard to imagine the Pantheon - standing in the exact same place, with the same forceful lift to its structure - in its heyday, in oh...well... 125 AD! How do you begin to wrap your mind around that?

The only comment card suggestion we could make to Rome would be the addition of a touch more shade. A few more shadows in which to cower when the afternoon sun is beating down. But other than that small favor - which is just a petty thing really, more of a luxury than a necessity - what can you add to a city that has been added to for centuries?



We ate exceptionally well at our favorite Roman restaurant and whenever we did a "buddy check" (a little something we picked up from the tour guides and their herds of followers) we came up even. Our hotel was in the process of renovating (yes, literally in the process - it was a construction site where the cleaning ladies were caught in a Sisyphusian battle to take away the accumulating dust and debris) and so had gloriously high-powered air conditioning and new furniture. Stefano secured us tickets to the Vatican Museum and swept us into the Colosseum with barely a line to be had. We explored basilicas and ruins, found fountains and friends, and kept on the trail of Pope Pius IX. It was a glorious weekend made even more so by our traveling companions.

There's nothing like a weekend in Rome to reset your understanding of the world's timeline... and remind you to make the most of your own.