“It’s just... love. And the unbridled nature of it. The inability to control it and the tsunami it is when you’re lost in it. The vast emptiness it leaves you in when it’s gone. And regaining the spirit to find it all, all over again.” It’s the scrawled sepias next to drying graffiti, the meringue tinge of peeling paint off the walls. The buildings seem purposefully tall enough to make one feel enclosed, yet the sky stays wholly visible. Trash litters the base of a structure that’s spanned millennia. The pace is casual-quick. You weave in and out, past clusters of people, different languages floating above every group. Decadent dress against pasty-new running shoes stands out. Everyone’s a tourist here. Stripped versions of the same songs are played via different mediums - a one-man percussive ensemble, classical guitarists, a woman with a harp - all play Hotel California or Despacito. A swarm of Vespas buzz to life with a green light, whining and rickety against the cobblestone street. Can you imagine living here? Would the magic last? Mild natured weather with a sheen of menace - there’s a marine-layer veneer that spits out every photograph overexposed. The city doesn’t want pictures to do its justice. It has this deceptive ability to continually reveal itself. Every corner could hold whatever it wants - a mom and pop coffee shop, a basilica containing centuries of religious whispers as thousands of birds dance in unison above the treetops, the glaringly obvious inspiration of your own country’s architecture - the more twist and turns with this city, more complicated and expansive your relationship. There’s humanity’s fingerprints all over it. Man has built all this extravagance; nooks and crannies refined over time with adapted and specified details that only history can cultivate. You feel at home here. There’s an unsubscribed destiny that somehow has kept going, as if the history books and the big-budget Oscar-winning films all portrayed it correctly - this place is epic, in the grandest form of the word. You feel human here. These piles of rubble were once grand cathedrals that lent themselves to human slaughter, sport, sacrifice; these hollowed-out veins stretching 15 feet below and hundreds of yards long were rivulets leading to bathhouses for the XI’s and XII’s of their names; towers and beams crumbling over one another showing the form of what used to be a theater, with stray cats vying for shade and attention in the columns of shade fingered across the dying grass. Insignificance is much more visceral when it’s splayed against such a large canvas. The remnants of Renaissance-era outdoing, different city-states all vying for the attention and capitulation of one another, producing some of the largest and most ground-breaking architecture humanity’s ever seen. Massive and extensive art projects, ceilings requiring the direction and coordination of tens of thousands of human lives that took decades to complete. Stolen obelisks from ancient Egypt that masquerade as their own pieces of resolution. Aqueducts spilling that same water that they have for hundreds of years are passed freely and frequently as you roam. There’s humanity’s fingerprints all over it. Mankind has built all this extravagance; nooks and crannies refined over time with adapted and specified details that only history can cultivate. We spend our whole lives relaying experience through our owns eyes, making informed observations as they’re seen through our own tiny windows of existence, spending little to no time disassociating enough to simply marvel at the grandness of human imprint and the ability to convey it throughout time. You expect to be impressed, you expect to fascinated. These are the observations relayed to you by others that have been there before. You don’t expect to find individualistic solitude in the idea that terrific amounts of people - in the most actionable way - love, have loved, and will love Rome. Then it’s the solipsistic realization: your relationship with a place will never be the same as someone else’s. You’re just one of the many. And as much as it hurts to leave, you regain the spirit to find that feeling - find it all - all over again. With somewhere else.