Italy

Devin Beliveau
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Italy, oh Italy. It’s one of those countries everyone wants to visit because it’s in romantic movies, it’s in action movies, it’s in adventure movies, it’s in classical movies. There’s nothing that can’t happen in Rome, apparently. My personal favorite Italy-based movie is Three Coins in the Fountain, 1954. It’s about American women who travel to Rome to become secretaries and fall in love, obviously. While my own experience in Italy was nothing of the sort, the atmosphere there does have that classical, romantic feel that’s hard to ignore.

Rome is Rome. It’s quite hard to explain. There are people walking around monuments, statues and buildings that have dates associated with them that are only three numbers long and end in AD. Those people rush around in their thousand-dollar leather shoes paying more attention to their technology than the history around them. It was easy to tell who was a tourist and who wasn’t just based on where people held their eyes. My eyes were up and swerving around not wanting to miss a single thing, while locals were staring at their feet and phones. I’ve certainly been jaded by a lot of things, but if I lived in Rome, I feel like that would never happen.

I could go on about Rome forever, probably, so I’ll just share my favorite memory. I traveled to Italy with (mostly) the same group I traveled with to Switzerland and Ireland, just one year later. My friend and I took off one morning to explore and came across the Altare della Patria (alternatively called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier). We climbed up the many steps to have a look around and in what felt like both slow and fast motion, the Colosseum came into view.

View of the Colosseum from the Altare della Patria. 2006.

Even though we were scheduled to tour the Colosseum the following day, we couldn’t help walking down the road and taking it all in. Vendors lined Via dei Fori Imperiali, the road leading to the Colosseum, trying to sell knock-off bags and belts and shoes. Photographing Rome is hard. There are so many details that are impossible to capture. Looking through my old photos is interesting, because even though they remind me of my time spent there, the little details of the city are lost and it’s hard to remember them.

The tour of the Colosseum was of course amazing. We raced around the city trying to get in as much as possible. We gazed up at the sky from inside the Pantheon, ran up the Spanish Steps and threw coins in the Trevi Fountain. We happened to be in Italy on Good Friday and went to the Vatican to see the Pope speak. We toured St. Peter’s Basilica and saw the famous La Pietà and eventually found our way to the Sistine Chapel where tourists secretly tried to take illegal photos of the masterpiece.

We did get to travel outside Rome. We spent a day in Florence walking up and down the streets, admiring the domes and eating delicious food. We traveled to Naples and gawked at the child-age pickpockets, running around stealing, bringing their spoils to adults wandering the streets, waiting. We walked around the city with views of Mount Vesuvius while we waited for our tour of Pompeii to begin.

Pompeii leaves an impression you can’t quite shake. I had the opportunity to go to a Pompeii exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston many years later and it was a surreal experience. It was a dark, cold display filled with casts while foreboding music played. It was a contrast to the sunny, warm city that I toured, where the casts were bathed in light. Just like Rome, it’s hard to explain Pompeii. There is a feeling there that’s just different. If anyone is traveling to Italy, Pompeii would be my suggestion as a day trip. It’s beautiful and surreal in a way I’ve yet to have replicated anywhere else.

A road in Pompeii. 2006.

Our flight out of Rome was very early in the morning. My friends and I took the opportunity to stay up all night and attend a pub crawl throughout the city. We got awesome t-shirts, which I still have, and we drank all night long. We actually had to leave the pub crawl early to go back to our hotel to grab our bags and head off. To this day, the flight from Rome back to the US was the only flight I’ve entirely slept through.

I’ll leave you with one last image, the Fontana di Trevi, the famous fountain where you must throw coins from your right hand over your left shoulder. One coin ensures you will return to Rome, two coins ensures you will find love and, just like the ladies of my favorite classical movie (spoiler alert), three coins ensures you will end up happily married.

Trevi Fountain. 2006.
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