Rome

The beautiful Shaylin at Trevi Fountain

        Miss Shaylin Brielle Carper has know me since the 6th grade and has somehow continued to put up with me for the past 9 years. This semester Shay has also been studying abroad in Italy (the lucky duck got to live in Rome) so of course, I had to visit her. 

My weekend with Shay was spent seeing all the major and beautiful sights of Rome, but also feeling the history around me. 

One of my new favorite things to do is to try to image what had happened where I’m standing/walking. How many people had taken that long walk to the Colosseum, or stood where I took my picture of it. What great thinkers, architects, poets, artists, had sat by and admired the work of the Trevi fountain, or gazed up at the opening of the Pantheon dome and had the same thought that I did? How many rulers and Popes have stood where I was standing and saw what I was seeing, what did they think of it? How can a city who has been through so much, still be standing?

The Pantheon

        Rome is one of those places where your mind tends to wander and your curiosity buds. You begin to question why and how, what were they thinking, and who could have built this? You begin to feel smaller and younger than you ever have before, after all you are nothing compared to the Roman Forum. How can a single fig tree tell the story of an entire nation, when I can’t even keep up with a blog about my travel*. 

Roman Forum

        This is what Rome does to you, it forces you to look. It forces you to pay attention. It forces you to see the past intertwining with the future. It forces you to see how small you are. It forces you to see how great and terrible we all are. Humans built this magnificent city, but so many lives are sure to have been lost through war, amusement, accident, sickness. How many homes and building were burnt down, how much art was destroyed, how many forests and fields were cleared and torn up? Humans, we can be great, but we must realize that all things have their price. We can’t build metro tunnels under the Colosseum and expect it to still be standing for another 2000 years. We need to remember that regardless of what some may say, nothing lasts forever.



This is what Rome does, it makes you think.

-Ciao

*Google the Story of Romulus, the founder of Rome