When my new landlady opened the door to the Roman apartment I was to inhabit with her for the next six months, I felt first a flash of excitement, then trepidation, as I began to realize that I had seen her before. She was a towering, pale woman with eyes the color of Castelvetrano green olives, and a bushel of coarse, red curls, which were piled into a bun. This was no ordinary bun. No, this bun was festooned with handmade barrettes fashioned after birds’ nests, replete with petite blue sparrows and speckled eggs. Even without her San Marzano-red hair and fair skin, she would have stood out anywhere due to her eclectic style of dress, which resembled what I imagine a haberdasher-cum-art gallerist might don if she were permitted only to wear garments from 1960s-themed vintage shops on Portobello Road. As she welcomed me inside, I surveyed the walls. Though I suspected they were white, not a centimeter of wall-space was visible. Framed works of art, mostly paintings, crowded out every possibility for the walls to show their true color. Postcards and flyers from events, some of them over a decade ago, were stuffed into the seam of a single long mirror that ran horizontally along the corridor. I complimented her home as I dragged my suitcase behind me, pretending not to notice that approximately one in three paintings appeared to be a nude portrait in her likeness. Over the following weeks and months, I would often find myself in Adriana’s pint-sized kitchen, swirling a glass of rosso di montepulciano, perched on a Lilliputian pink plastic chair, conversing in my broken Italian. I was spending my days studying politics, a subject towards which I felt indifferent, but that seemed to console my well-meaning immigrant parents that at least I wasn’t pursuing something “trivial,” like art history, or creative writing. My weekends and evenings were spent in my real classroom, twisting ankles on cobblestone streets in dire need of repair and reading Wikipedia pages on my cell phone of every church, sculpture, and plaque I passed that piqued my fancy. Just around the corner from Adriana’s apartment was the neighborhood’s anchor, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Though famous for the quality of its 13th century Byzantine-inspired mosaics, which shimmer seductively like gold sequins on a party dress, I have a great deal of fondness for case study on Roman resourcefulness whispered by the building’s columns. I had been inside countless times, but a telling detail had managed to escape my notice until one day I was invited to accompany a German art historian for a visit. She pointed out that each of its columns was unique, having been repurposed from various defunct structures around the city and retrofitted to match in height. This, I learned, is Rome’s truest story. When Adriana caught me poised to discard a particularly lovely piece of tissue wrapping paper, she would command me to “Fermati!” so that she could rescue it to add to her collection of second hand wrapping materials. No glass jar was to leave that apartment. They were to be scrubbed and their labels scraped, and they were to be added to a tall shelf above the sink, where they would largely sit unused and out of reach without the aid of a ladder, a library of transparent bric-a-brac. I recall Adriana’s delight and pride as she pointed out the tiles of her kitchen backsplash, which she said were manufactured and hand-painted in Naples in the 17th century, their asymmetries somehow aesthetically and functionally perfect. The Eternal City consumes, subsumes, and reforms itself; this is the very basis of its eternity. Consider the Colosseum, now a gargantuan traffic circle. The Roman Forum lay for hundreds of years following the Empire’s collapse as little more than pasture for sheep. The city’s many piazze are often treated like extensions of living rooms. There is almost no physical limit to how many motorini can be crammed into a single street. As time carries us forward, we adapt to tourists, traffic, changing uses of space across time. But Adriana taught me that the tools to carry on are always there, begging for reinvention.