Way too much has happened during the last week for me to even begin to discuss. I’ve just been overwhelmed with everything, and until today I haven’t had any time to settle down and relax. Some things have been utterly fantastic, and while some things have been less than fantastic, I guess on the whole it’s been a pretty big learning experience.

So first, there’s Rome. Rome was unimaginably cool. I think I liked it much better than Paris, in fact. This despite the fact that I was offered drugs right outside our hostel door, a 35 year old man tried to pick me up and take me to his house for reasons I won’t speculate on, and my friend and I walked through Palatino Hill while a police shootout occurred only a short distance away.

Needless to say, Rome is not the city you go to if you want to feel separated from the problems of urban life. There’s graffiti everywhere, the city has significant bad areas, and compared to Britain at least, there are an enormous number of homeless people. You can’t ignore the problems that exist in Rome, but you don’t want to. The experience feels too epic for that, and failing to see those problems is like missing a major chapter in Roman history.

The monuments, architecture, ruins, and history are great, as one would expect. But you can read into it so much more than that. In the long run, Rome is a city in decline. Italy is a country that is desparately trying to hold onto its glorious past, that is trying to match the grandeur of its 1000 year political empire, followed by its 1000 year religious one. It’s willing to go to far greater lengths than England in order to maintain this sense of tradition. In Rome, you can’t help but get the feel that the city is somehow still fighting the modern age.

The Vatican was an experience unto itself. I know that a great many people visit the Vatican as a religious pilgrimage, and a great many people are inspired by it. But frankly, I am not one of those people. I was put off by the Vatican in a lot of ways. How can a religion whose first commandment condemns the existence of graven images personally collect one of the best collections of such images from Rome, Egypt, and other ancient civilizations? I know that the church was the most powerful institution on Earth for 1000 years, but while walking through the Vatican museums, I kept thinking that the doctrine of good works was awfully self-serving when it came to collecting all these treasures. I’m an agnostic, but frankly, I felt like the the museums could make a Protestant out of any Catholic.

That wasn’t all though. The security people in the Sistene Chapel were unfriendly and off-putting. In a place as supposedly holy as the Sistene Chapel, the church is supposed to make me feel valued as a human being, not to make me feel like a nuisance. Also, the little mini gift shops in the middle of seemingly every room were rather grating considering that most of the rooms are or were at one time chapels. I guess when it comes down to it, the Vatican didn’t do a good job of making me feel like I was in the Vatican, with all the humility and solemnity and importance that should rightly go with it, and that bothered me.

…but on to the next thing. Saturday night, Simon and Garfunkel played a free open-air concert outside the Colosseum. I can’t even describe this experience adequately. The thought of tens of thousands of people from all over the world coming together in one of the most historic places in the world to hear a concert like this is simply unbelievable. We waited for hours, meeting people and having a great time. Then, as they played, the full moon rose behind the Colosseum. It was powerful.

I don’t think there’s a band in the world that could have been better for that setting than Simon and Garfunkel. Besides their obvious importance in musical history, they’re one of the few bands that has the intellectual depth, relevance, and insight to really make the most of such an event. This trip is really becoming an epic personal journey for me, and I feel that their music reflects that journey. During “America,” I started tearing up. It didn’t matter that I was thousands of miles from America; it represented the spirit of discovery that I was finally finding in myself.

For me, Rome almost wasn’t about being in Rome. Seeing the sights was great, but it wasn’t what I was really interested in. I was there to meet new people. I was there to learn about the culture. I was there to feel alienated, to find my way again, and in doing so, I was there to grow. I got to do all of those things. I needed to do those things.

Getting back here, I feel like there’s so much more that I need to do and so little time to do it. I’ve had a great time in England, to be sure, and I’ve seen and done plenty of awesome things. But I’ve hardly met anyone, I’ve never felt truly felt alienated, and ultimately, I don’t think that this experience has been as meaningful to me as it should have been. In the next three weeks, I intend to change that. I will pour into my experience the vitality that I found in Rome, and I think the results will be well worth the effort.

I’ll let you know what becomes of it.

Posted on August 5th, 2004 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized