Day Eight was all trains and napping… possibly still more interesting than the job at which you’re likely reading this but still a bit of a stretch to make interesting on my end. We pick up our story with Day Nine.
Today we saw the Pantheon, which was a weird experience for me. In fact, much of Rome is/was. I studied architecture for a few years and finally making it out here has been surreal. The Pantheon was always treated as a bit of an anchor in our studies, it’s in amazing shape for its age, for one, but is also the go-to “you’ll wake up to this building when you study here your semester abroad” building. Having switched careers, that day never came for me. But besides never expecting to see it, the Pantheon and many other buildings here never seemed real to me. Rome isn’t a place people live and work and play and act like jerks. Rome is pressed into the pages of history books, sterile and preserved for Academia.
Except Rome IS a place for those things.
I knew Rome wasn’t the historical preserve we studied in school, of course I did, though I still somehow expected to step into a text book. But Rome isn’t a text book. Other than its age, it’s like any other city. It’s hot and noisy, trash meanders about like so much urban tumbleweed, street vendors litter the steps of otherwise beautiful public spaces and you’re constantly playing Russian roulette with scents of the city, more often losing than winning.
It’s hard for me to reconcile the mixed messages received sitting in front of a building like the Pantheon while hearing a slurry of modern sirens, street musicians playing rearranged Beetles songs, endless digital shutter sounds (ironies in their own right) and merchants loudly courting visitors away from culture and toward pizza.
All that being said, seeing the Pantheon was a nearly religious experience for me (no pun intended) and despite the modern world that has sprung up around it, sitting in front and touching the marble within I found a certain serentiy. It was a unique combination of finally seeing this building that had only ever been a concept to me, of being transported back to an emotionally dense period in my life that I hadn’t thought about in a while and abject disbelief that there really is a MacDonald’s across the street.
Today we also saw The Vatican, The Trevi Fountain, the Sistine Chapel (not pictured) and a bunch of other old buildings that surprised us around bends in our only mildly planned-out path. Despite being just another city, Rome does throw some pretty fine curve balls when you don’t know where you’re going.
While in the Sistine chapel, where no photos are allowed, over P.A. they requested silence and then reminded us sternly in many languages that no photos were allowed. The crowd, amazingly, came quickly to a hush, the only sound that could be heard was a singular photo being snapped. 🤦♂️ How the museum workers make it through a day without strangling tourists with their own cameras is beyond me.
