Dave the Nomad

All roads lead to Rome, and so did the train tracks my train was following. After spending several days here I can truly say I really like this city. Its chaotic, historic, mysterious, and has an old world cosmopolitan feel. I ran into a couple of friends I met in Florence on the metro and we visited most of the cities famous sights together. Although many places do have admission fees, there is still a lot to do for free, including: St. Peter’s Basilica, Trevi Fountain, The Mouth of Truth, The Parthenon, Spanish Steps, Circus Maximas, Repubblica Square, and a handful of churches and other smaller items. You can also see a good portion of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill from outside the park if you aren’t huge into archaeological sites.

The Colosseum and archaeological park is an amazing site, and I fought back the cliché scenes from Gladiator and Ben Hur while walking around this area, but it really is a place to let your imagination run wild and envision days of yonder ages. Sometimes I think why exactly it is parents drag a couple of ten year old children through sites like this, until I realize these places aren’t about learning the historical facts, they are about opening up the mind, and allowing them to develop a mental stronghold. I am also grateful of the traveling I did as a kid with my family, albeit maybe more about playing with my brother in a new setting and remembering “how things were” in a more imaginative and grandiose manner than reality dictated.

Sometimes you cannot really create a good opinion or idea of a place until you are long gone, and have had some time to recollect your thoughts. Rome is one of these places. While walking around in a whirlwind of sightseeing, and dodging scooters as a second profession, it is hard to comprehend the plethora of normal culture absorption, history, and conversation you may have in a day. I realize now that one of the reasons I like Rome so much is its similarity to Japan. Japan has done a wonderful job of respecting the past (much more so than Rome), and this is most tangibly noticed in the melding of city buildings. A two thousand year old temple could be left undisturbed, but buttressed next to three skyscrapers filled with salarymen and daily business. The best example I can think of this in Rome is a movie theater.

There is a movie theater about 75 yards from Trevi Fountain, and while they were building this theater, they found an underground street. Sometimes this would prompt a removal of the items to a museum, creation of a site and abandoning the theater, or just forgetting about the site as there are just too many as is in Rome. Instead, they built a slightly smaller theater with side windows that look out over the excavated area and small catwalks to walk around them and read plaques with historic descriptions. In a world where we commonly indulge a fad and forget about our past, or just knock down the old to bring in the new, it is a refreshing change.

I would be lying if I told you I found this theater on my own or from a guidebook, I instead heard about it from a guy at my hostel named Will. He is a Watson Fellow studying subterranean spaces around the world for a year, and had some great stories and local hints from people he had been working with through the past months. Its a refreshing change, and we will try to meet up again in Palermo, Sicily for Thanksgiving, since only Americans (and Canadians, but earlier) seem to have a craving for turkey and stuffing this time of year.