Rome
Rome is almost overwhelming. You can be walking down an ordinary modern street, turn a corner and suddenly find yourself staring at something that’s been standing there for two thousand years. Ancient ruins, Renaissance palaces, enormous churches, fountains and monuments are scattered everywhere. The whole city feels like one gigantic archaeological site that people somehow decided to keep living in.
The Colosseum and Roman Forum are the obvious reminders of ancient Rome, but what impressed me most was how completely the past is woven into the modern city. Layers of history are literally built on top of one another, and there’s always something else hiding around the next corner.
Then there are places like the Pantheon and Trevi Fountain, along with piazzas, churches and sculptures seemingly everywhere you look. You could spend weeks exploring Rome and still feel like you’d barely scratched the surface.
Of course, being Italy, all that history had to compete with pasta, pizza, espresso, wine and gelato for our attention. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.
