Rome ~ every road eventually leads here
When you travel to Rome you understand why it is called the "Eternal City." Between the ruins of an empire that once ran the world, nearly 1,000 Catholic churches tucked into every corner, streets that smell like cafes and restaurants at every turn, and an energy that pulls you in the moment you arrive, this is a city that stays with you long after you've left.
I was four years old the first time I came to Rome with my family. We only stayed a few short days, and of everything we saw, two distinct things I remember. Standing in front of the Colosseum being entertained and slightly afraid by a man in a Gladiator costume. And ordering spaghetti that arrived with one large meatball, almost the size of my head. I've been back to Rome four more times since then, and every visit adds a layer without ever replacing that first one.
This trip, Rome was my last stop rather than my first. I usually like to start my travel journeys with a major city, when I have the most energy for it, but this time the pieces fell differently. Performances, events, and a plan to dodge the busiest tourist towns on weekends meant saving Rome for the end of my month in Italy. Rome is where I feel most like a traveler and a tourist at once, still capable of being stopped in my tracks by something I've walked past a dozen times before.
My first night I signed up for a culinary food tour. This is a great way to learn about the local cuisine and discover the best places to eat. We walked through a few neighborhoods, stopping for cacio e pepe where the sauce clung to the pasta, then at a spot known for its vegetarian dishes with a Roman twist that I never would have found on my own. We ended, as any good food tour should, with gelato. Nothing on that tour came close to the size of the meatball I remember from my four year old self, but the pasta and gelato more than made up for it. I tried carbonara made the traditional way, eggs and guanciale and pecorino with no cream anywhere near it, and it has instantly become one of my favorite Italian dishes.
Rome is a city that is constantly reinventing itself in the same footprint. Walk one block and you're beside ruins thousands of years old. Turn a corner and you're standing under Renaissance frescoes inside a church you didn't know was there. Keep going and you're back among 17th century houses and shopfronts, everything sharing narrow cobblestone streets that were never built for the cars, vespas, and pedestrians now squeezed into them. Somehow it all holds together.
Visiting the major sites filled a fair amount of my days, and they're worth returning to even on a fourth or fifth visit. I stood in the Pantheon's line for less time than expected and spent a while under that dome, still amazed how it was built in the first century without modern tools. The Colosseum and Roman Forum came next, and I've seen the movie Gladiator enough times that I felt every scene of it replaying as I moved through the different levels of the arena, a long way from the four year old who thought the man in the costume outside was the real thing. I ended that day at the Catacombs of San Sebastian, walking the tunnels carved to honor the dead, a quieter kind of awe than the Colosseum's.
The Vatican Museum and St. Peter's Basilica are a stop I make every trip, and it still catches me off guard. The Sistine Chapel is packed with visitors standing shoulder to shoulder, but I find a way to thread my way into the middle of the room, neck craned, as I take in Michelangelo's masterpiece, inch by inch. St. Peter's has the opposite effect. The vastness and the opulence give you room to breathe and reflect. Both give me the same thing, a minute where I stop narrating the trip to myself and just stand there.
Climbing into the dome of St. Peter's turned out to be one of the more memorable parts of the trip. The stairs start narrow and only get narrower, curving along the inside of the dome's shell before spitting you out onto a small interior gallery. From there you can look straight down into the basilica, tiny figures moving across the marble floor far below. Then the stairs keep going, tighter still, until they open onto the exterior walkway that circles the very top. From up there, Rome stops being a city you're walking through and starts being one you can actually see the size of. Rooftops and domes and antennas stretching out in every direction, the whole layout of the city finally making sense at once, in a way it never has on any of my other visits. I've been inside St. Peter's many times, but I'd never gone up, and I'm not sure why it took me this long.
Pompeii was its own day entirely, and it deserved to be. I booked a guided tour, which turned out to be the right call. Walking actual streets worn smooth by cart wheels two thousand years ago, past houses with mosaic floors still intact and frescoes still holding their color on the walls, is one thing. Having someone explain what you're looking at as you go is another. Plaster casts of the people caught in the eruption are placed throughout the site, curled into positions that stop you in a way no museum artifact can. It doesn't feel like visiting ancient history so much as walking into a place people simply left mid afternoon, expecting to come back. Vesuvius sits quietly in the distance the whole time you're there, which somehow makes it more unsettling, not less. I thought, standing there, about how strange it is that a place can stay exactly the same for two thousand years while I keep coming back changed.
I did the obvious tourist things as well. Piazza Navona, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the places every visitor hits, the same ones I've stood in front of on every trip since I was small. I set an alarm for sunrise photography one morning and got to the Trevi Fountain just after 5am, convinced I'd have it to myself. Instead I found more than sixty people already there getting their selfies and wedding shots. Apparently everyone gets the same advice about the best time to shoot. Still, I caught the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum nearly empty as the sun came up, and Rome at 4:30 in the morning turned out to be its own kind of alive. Some people just ending their night, others just starting the day, nobody fully asleep.
I left some time for doing nothing in particular. Wander a district away from the crowds, finding a park bench, a café, watching the city move around me. That's usually where a trip settles for me, in the parts with no agenda. And somewhere in one of those quiet stretches, I found myself thinking back to that four year old outside the Colosseum, no idea yet what Rome would become to him. I never did find a meatball to match the one from that first trip, and honestly, I stopped looking for it somewhere around my second plate of carbonara. I don't think I've ever fully explained to myself why I keep returning to this city more than any other. But sitting there, I didn't need to. Some places you visit. This one, apparently, I just keep coming back to.
