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And I admit it in public: I fell head over heels for Rome, that city gets her hands on you and doesn't let go.
It's incredible. Not only the museums (statues everywhere, and mosaics, and paintings, and all those bronzes, oh, Lord! All those ancient bronzes!), but the stratification of history everywhere within the 'old' quarters, knowing that while one walks around one is threading in the footsteps of Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Gregory VII, Michelangelo, Raphael, Cellini; saints and sinners, artists, poets, musicians, princes and agitators, artisans and imperators.
One reads about her (forgive me, but Rome is, without any doubt, female), learns her history; the language of her citizens spread through alliances and conquests, one can well hate the rethoric sourrounding her, the ruthlessness of her wars, the appropriation of everything Greek and Egyptian (not a single philosophical school was originally Roman, for instance), and then this sorceress of a city unleash her charms...and that's it. Just like countless others who went there through the centuries, one fells in love in the space of a single afternoon.
The Vatican Museums are beyond description (we felt somewhat sorry for the modern art collection, sadwiched between the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel), as are the Capitoline Museums, but simply walking around one can be surprised, turning a corner, by Pasquino , or the Temple of Hercules Victor or the Column of Trajan...
I naively believed that Rome would be somewhat just a bigger Verona (there are a lot of similarities between the two, honestly), but she disabused me of the notion immediately, I think I've a fair idea, now, how Vergilius and Catullus felt when they first set eyes on the Caput Mundi .
It's incredible. Not only the museums (statues everywhere, and mosaics, and paintings, and all those bronzes, oh, Lord! All those ancient bronzes!), but the stratification of history everywhere within the 'old' quarters, knowing that while one walks around one is threading in the footsteps of Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Gregory VII, Michelangelo, Raphael, Cellini; saints and sinners, artists, poets, musicians, princes and agitators, artisans and imperators.
One reads about her (forgive me, but Rome is, without any doubt, female), learns her history; the language of her citizens spread through alliances and conquests, one can well hate the rethoric sourrounding her, the ruthlessness of her wars, the appropriation of everything Greek and Egyptian (not a single philosophical school was originally Roman, for instance), and then this sorceress of a city unleash her charms...and that's it. Just like countless others who went there through the centuries, one fells in love in the space of a single afternoon.
The Vatican Museums are beyond description (we felt somewhat sorry for the modern art collection, sadwiched between the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel), as are the Capitoline Museums, but simply walking around one can be surprised, turning a corner, by Pasquino , or the Temple of Hercules Victor or the Column of Trajan...
I naively believed that Rome would be somewhat just a bigger Verona (there are a lot of similarities between the two, honestly), but she disabused me of the notion immediately, I think I've a fair idea, now, how Vergilius and Catullus felt when they first set eyes on the Caput Mundi .
