Dissappear

I keep on coming back to the idea of the “weight of history” that Romans must constantly feel. They live in a city that was the center of the world for a long time that can never be matched.

Before I left I was watching Oprah. It’s her last season in the US and she was talking to J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame about having something to utterly amazing, like her TV show and Rowling’s books, and not wanting to feel like she is forever chasing that dream of doing something better than what she already created. I think the Romans must live in a world like that. They walk around their neighborhoods and go to their markets on roads that have existed for almost forever. Even I feel it, whenever I go anywhere in this city I can only think about the people who did this before me; whether it was the day before or a few centuries ago, someone else did this. There is nothing new here, history only can repeat itself so many times before it’s not even repetition, it’s stops existing in a linear manner and everything happens at once. 

Like the last sentence of 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, “Before reaching the final line…he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men… and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since from time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Rome can never be what it once was. Once I realized that this entire place makes more sense.

I took my first trip outside of Roma this weekend, a few of us from the program went up to Florence on Friday and came back tonight.

I noticed two major things.

1) That city is almost as obsessed with Dante and I am. Which is saying something. It was amazing, I got to see his house, his church, where Beatrice is buried. I actually hugged the walls of his church, I hugged something Dante could had touched and I got to recite part of Canto I of Inferno in front of his house. AND I saw the painting that was the cover of the Cambridge Companion to Dante reader I poured over in the fall. Even the fresco in the Duomo is Dantean in nature.

and

2) I missed Rome. Florence is beautiful, but Roma, how I missed thee. Never have I been so happy to hop on the 170 and watch as the bus wind it's way through the city center, across the river to Via Marconi, get off and head directly into Pong (the gelato place outside of my apartment building) before coming back to my room and just looking at the city. It's chaotic and insane here but even being away for three days made me miss it. And I've only been here two weeks.

 What up Dante's house?

The view from the top of the Duomo. 

Where I want to live.