Journal Entry No. 2

My Fascination with Rome

I’ve had a long-held fascination with Rome since I was a little girl. I first came to Rome, I am told, when I was 10 months old. I recall, at age 15 or so, staring out from a hotel window onto the busy pre-dawn streets of the city and saying to my mother “can we live here?”. I’m not sure what it was about the city, at that age, that captured me but it has never left.

I am back in Rome now, it has been 6 years since I was last here, and though I am noticing many changes (the crowds, the somewhat declining quality of food) there are touch stones that haven’t, and won’t, change for years to come. These touchstone - quite literally, many of them are in fact stone - bring me back to that first moment of awe when I encountered them on my many teenage and young adult walk-abouts through the city: Santa Maria in Trastevere, Bernini’s David in Galleria Borghese, the grounds of Villa Borghese and the view from Il Pincio, the scent of spring rain on cobblestone streets, the reflection of light on Boromini’s marble staircase in Palazzo Barberini… any many more.

Rome has a theatrical quality about it - walk along a fairly casual street, turn the corner and there’s awe to behold in a phenomenal fountain rising up into the skies. Rome is a palimpsest of it’s own story: apartment buildings built into the ruins of old aquedecuts, temples meet magistrate offices, grocery stores ‘shoved’ into archways that then snake through old store-rooms and provide Romans fresh vegetables, fish and meats for their daily meals. Rome is alive with modernity dovetailed into history - we walk the cobbles that have been walked on by Romans for centuries. They were heading home to lunch as we are today and this layering of history, present day, story, life and survival has a lot to do with what continues to hold my fascination with this Eternal City.