[Drafted by hand in Rome and edited and posted upon return.]
There’s nothing like Europe—or pretty much anywhere outside the continental U.S.—to make me feel like a total ignoramus. Trust me, the doctorate is no reflection on my grasp of world history, or names and dates and geography in general. I can’t tell you how long it took me to remember for sure that the French Revolution, or at least its first (de)crowning moments, occurred in 1789–and that’s one of the most important dates to know as a teacher of political theory. Every time I teach Plato or Aristotle (the classics admittedly not being my forté) I have to look up the dates again—which one was 4th C. B.C. and which was 5th? (Answer: they crossed over a tad: Plato c. 427-327 B.C.; Aristotle c. 384-322. Yeah, I had to look that up again.) Some scholars may discount online cheat sheets, but I’d pretty much die without Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica; they’ve gotten me through more lectures than I care to admit.
So here we are, dwarfed by Rome and the beautiful treasures therein.
One glance at the city map and I feel defeated: “No way can we possibly cover, let alone absorb, this many mind-boggling sites in less than 36 hours!” I’m not exaggerating when I say that every twenty steps one is confronted with a looming monument of historical significance. It’s not just the abundance of man-made wonders; it’s how little I know about any of them, how unsure I am about what they really mean. Between our ultra-tight budget and lack of time, there is no way we can do the minimum required to manage Rome: half-day tours for each major site with knowledgeable guides. Left to my own devices, I feel like crawling under the hotel bed and wallowing in the shame of my meager education. Mental fledgling:
History? 1789 is small change. Try, oh, 753 B.C. when Romulus founded Rome. How ‘bout 125 A.D. when Christians under the emperor Hadrian rebuilt what had been a temple to the Roman gods for hundreds of years into the feat of ancient engineering that is the Pantheon. We gaped at I Fori Imperiali, the ruins of a sprawling civic space that Julius Caesar started in Christ’s lifetime and bigwigs like Agustus, Traiano, Nerva and fricking Mussolini added onto in the intervening twenty centuries.
Across the street was the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuel II the first monument to glorify Italy as a unified nation-state, finished in 1935.
Next to that was the Palazzo Venezia a medieval masterpiece that rulers from Pope Paul II to Napoleon to Mussolini used as a seat of power. For the first time, I realized that those monstruous Las Vegas fakes on the strip, such as Caesar’s Palace, are actually pretty close to or even smaller than scale. These tributes to masculinity, hegemony, and empire are huge. I was plenty overwhelmed even before we rounded the corner and confronted the Coliseum and surrounding ancient ruins. At that point I couldn’t do anything but cry. I find it so intense to stand amidst the relics of human activity that old.
Spanish steps (actually given to Rome by the French, which I found out when I borrowed a British teenager’s guidebook):
So much is lost on me. Augustus? Yeah, I think I’ve heard of that guy. Titus, was he that bully who always tortured Popeye? Didn’t Van Halen play at the Coliseum in the ‘80s? Oh no, that’s where real gladiators fought each other—or boars, bulls, tigers, etc.—til somebody keeled over, while high status Romans munched popcorn.
The Quirinale? Yeah, the king of Italy lived in its sprawling campus, and the Pope, until he started shackin’ up in the VATICAN (but I’d’ve failed a pop quiz on any of that). The Vatican, you know, that little place that houses St. Peter’s Basilica, where Michelangelo’s Pietá—a sculpture he completed at the ripe old age of 23—greets you when you walk in? The Basilica makes every stunning cathedral I’ve ever seen look like a ghetto storefront church.
In fact, Rome makes you (or at least me) wonder what the hell you’re doing on this planet anyway. Are you designing an open dome like the one in the Panethon that will last some two millennia without the use of reinforced concrete, despite the fact that rain can enter any time it wants?
Or are you just human filler (see April post), like the human bones used to fortify walls in Delos (or like these idiotic tourists)?
If you had a past life in Renaissance Italy, were you carting loads of marble dust on your spine, or were you assisting God and Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, or hanging out with Raphael in Florence? (‘Cuz, no offense, but I don’t think any of us were the artists themselves.) My point is, after cluelessly stumbling by all these masterpieces, I’d feel lucky if I’d been a cat sprawling somewhere near one of the bridges over the Tevere river. Judging by the dumb look on my sunburned face and the fact that, like half a million others today I tossed a coin over my shoulder into the Trevi Fountain for luck, I’d say there’s no doubt that even on my best days my life’s achievements amount to the insignificant products of human filler.
The question Rome boldly asks us, over and over, is: What will your legacy be?
Humbling in the extreme.
Maybe it was feeling like an intellectual midget that made me eat as much pizza, pasta and gelato as I could—which I have to concede was comforting. “When in Rome,” as they say. Yeah, I’ll be returning to South Beach Diet when I get home.
Oh, and one little other happy observation. The fuel economy vehicles in Europe, and especially Italy, make the Toyota Prius look like an SUV. And they’re totally cool looking. This gives me home that someday my countrypeople might actually abandon their global warming pods.
I don’t know what else to say. I’m not worthy.
I missed my Greek friend Maria so much, this is for her: 
