Present Histories: Life in Rome as an American student

It's kind of hard, as a New Worlder, to parse the history of Rome in my head as I walk to and from school. As stated in my last blog post, nothing in the United States is over a thousand years old. But in Rome, as I experienced, it's entirely possible to just stumble upon things like the Pantheon or the Colosseum on your walk around town.

Santa Barbara makes itself look old. As far as the Spanish revival architecture can take it, at least. But you'll never see wear and tear like the graffiti-mauled mortar in Rome in a place like that. It's a fundamental difference.

Even now, sitting in my apartment writing this, I'm having a hard time properly parsing the fact I've been in an ancient, foreign country for about two weeks now. For class we saw a church whose foundations rested on a lower level of the city--Rome has been built atop itself so many times that the entrance to this building was only accessible in a pit in the ground. That same class will also have a day where we tour the Vatican City.

The Vatican itself is only a 20-30 minute walk from my apartment. I know this because, the first weekend, as I took a stroll by the Tiber in a random direction, I ended up face-to-face with St. Peter's Basilica, in the borderland of a foreign country.

Even better still is that the Vittoriano, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon are only a short walk from school. Hell, I know a place near the Pantheon that serves the best ice cream I've ever eaten in my life, and I'm a regular there. It has an award from the city and everything. I'm totally bragging, by the way.

Needless to say: I'm having a great time. The only way I'm sure I'll come to regret this program is when I go home and all other ice cream is ruined forever.

It's been so great that I, for a Creative Writing assignment, wrote some hipster crap for an essay. I'll be damned if I let it go to waste, so in the spirit of posterity, here it is in full, all 799 words:

American in Rome

Jhumpa Lahiri said the North Atlantic bears water heavier than salt. She’s braver than me in that way; she crossed by swimming, counting the strokes of those who crossed before and bearing the same cruel whip of frigid seawater on pressure-bruised skin. Whereas I crossed by airplane.

I never learned to speak Farsi. I could have spoken that and Japanese were I taught as a kid, but America wrapped his shawl around my newborn flesh in cold welcoming. I wear lighter skin than my cousins and uncles, and I pass over his horrible stroads like my eyes are blue like the ocean he rode in on. The North Atlantic is cold and heavy, but America gave me airplanes of English, gave me aircraft carriers of “scusi.”

When I walk around the city I come across kids who laugh like Americans, who have American hair and American clothes. Such is to be expected in this city and this country. I’ll neither say I feel any disconnect or animosity, or connection or identification with these people; I have enough company in my wonderful classmates, professors, roommates, and the family who always keeps in touch with me. 

But there’s someone else here. I feel the need to write a message to him, because he’s been here for me this entire time. 

In the early morning your legs ended in marble arches. You were standing under the rafters of some new renovation in a part of town I frequented, but I’d never seen you before, and I thought about how well you’d fit in back home. I could see your blood of porphyry in capillaries drawing freshly to the surface of your being; I could sink my teeth into you and taste something like soil, fungous and nervous and healthy. You took long steps, and under your columns there nourished more grateful lifeforms than you and I, resting soundly under unset bricks in narrower alleys. Down-to-earth, I guess. 

Still in the evening we couldn’t speak to each other. I’d just taken the plane over to your town and you looked at me with little obelisks pointed at my head like you knew something unlistenable would come out of my mouth. I speak English because it’s the only language I know, and you learned to speak it for that same reason. Your vocal chords strung underneath, liver in the drains and a heart hidden somewhere in the gardens, where your mouth hung severed over every cafe and restaurant just to talk to me in clean, sweet English, to baby me, guide me through you. 

In the morning you were alive and hungry. You woke at war with the east and sidelined trade routes to the north and south. When the sun came up the top of your crown bumped against it and came back sparking. America is too big for the world, you said, but the world was barely big enough for you before it grew to encompass your Carthaginian passages and your Byzantine vessels. 

In the night your passages remain imperceptible. Crossing you is an active risk, no less walking alongside you, yet sometimes even still I see the little gifts of the past like the tracks cutting the asphalt or the tight brickwork in your backroads. Night is when you retire to your grand antechamber and recline like a panther on your throne. You remain feared even in the dark beyond your high chamber.

I saw traces of these faces of you back in Santa Barbara, in America’s company. But I never knew your name until now. 

Like society is trapped in the lens of romance, history is in the lens of you. I look at you, and many others, with eyes that could be assumed empty. Maybe I’m just spoiled, Santa Barbara being the beautiful riviera it is, but I never shared the same touristic glee at seeing your sights as many others. But when I look at you I see clearly the threads you have woven from Asia to the Americas, sometimes in words that I confuse with the Mexican Spanish spoken back home, or in the history lessons in class and in the field that tell stories about the world’s first global superpower. Seeing this now in such an unassuming nation is a treat for sure, and, make no mistake, one that I’m proud and privileged to now be a part of. 

I’d been strangely ignorant of your offspring and their histories, only being a passing fact of the various teachings for languages, cultures, art, and architecture so far removed from each other. Yours was a name that slipped past my eyes and ears. But now that I’m here, in the nexus of nearly all that has passed through the hands of humans, I know that your name is Rome. 

Pretentious drivel, I know, but my mom and dad read this, so.

But needless to say, it's been a good handful of days.

Here's a nicer picture I took, in panorama for your convenience. This is one of dozens of genuine, authentic Ancient Egyptian obelisks around the city. Looking at Google Maps I am 93.0738 percent sure this is the Piazza del Popolo, near the Spanish Steps, seen in the background. I could be wrong, sorry.

The obelisk in that picture is way bigger than you think, actually.

As we learned in Italian Art History, the Romans stole several giant obelisks from Egypt and took them to their shining capital on the hill. As stated, these are the genuine article; the Christendom has placed crosses atop their peaks to signify their ownership by the Papacy, and several of them have been incorporated into more contemporary sculptures.

There is a combination of factors that lead to Rome's preservation: burgeoning tourism, Papal protections, and thousands of years of coextensive habitation have lead the city to flawlessly preserve most of its ancient heritage. It is perhaps because of the ancient Romans' prowess in engineering and city-building that much of its layout and overground has stayed put.

The same obelisk up close. I dunno what it says in Ancient Egyptian.

Rome comes with so many historic plazas and squares. The usual European city only has the one big one, the one where everyone goes and everywhere coalesces. But Rome, from what I've seen, has to have at least seven or eight.

This is because Rome's nexus is multicellular; it has no center, the various knots in its vast networks clotting at random points of high interflow scattered throughout the body. So many different sets of feet have walked the city in such varying patterns that its yolk has split, and the egg white has splattered across the pan's ripping surface, hardening over the centuries as a collage of human ingenuity.

Backstreets crane weirdly from cobblestone boulevards. Shops and outlets, boutiques and smoky cafes perch on the narrows to overlook a city unchanged as it is changing. This isn't the many-thorned nettles of Los Angeles or the carpenter's nightmare of New York; this is the nightmares of Caesar and da Vinci, coalesced here and now into a vast canvas of inconsistencies, bad equations and rotten marks skittering across the web. The American mind can sparsely comprehend this blessed mess.

It's important in a way that mattered a long time ago, to people who've been around for centuries in ways we cannot know.

Also important: this bomb-ass sandwich I got in Florence.

I saw this in situ when we visited Florence over the last weekend. We stayed near St. Mark's Plaza; small and cramped, a statue of the saint himself stood dagger-like on a small overlook to watch the people crowding on the twenty-first-century benches eating their sandwiches and feeding the birds.

I drew parallels between Florence and Santa Barbara. It's a small tourist town, pretty but not a lot to actually do. I imagine the Italians living there inhabit a sort of liminal wasteland similar to my own.

But still, there's so much preserved there. But instead of living in the city itself, aside from the Duomo and the various works of the Medici dynasty, most of their treasures are kept hidden inside, quarantined from the world. These things were funded by a family of entrepreneurs bent on beautifying the seat of their monetocracy; there were no Pyrrhic wars or battles won behind these antiques, only the old money supporting a young artist whose allegiances ultimately laid elsewhere. It wasn't disappointing, but it was different, to be sure.

The Romans built Florence once, long ago, like how the Etruscans built the city on the bend of the Tiber. But now that city belongs to the grandchildren, something for the newer generations. Rome is for the old ones. Rome adapts a strange veneer of contemporaneity, but ultimately it can never shake the marble pillars rooting it to the earth's underbelly. A shifting mantle of souls bubbles under our feet--somewhere else, flowers sprout from the rich waters of their eruptions, feeding into the streams. Rome's spider web extends outwards, catching all of these small morsels and eating them whole.

I can't help but look back at America, an empire twice-fallen, and wonder what city will represent our legacy. I doubt it'll be any of the contenders in our heads.

What megaliths will remain of us, and what Romans to build them?