This City Will Teach You How to Say Goodbye
Some things, if you watch them long enough, make you start to think that you can see the true nature of everything. The ocean. An open fire. Crowds are like this too. Sit on the cool marble steps in December sunshine by the monument to Vittorio Emanuele, and you run a real risk of thinking that you’ve discovered something.
It’s all here. Everything human is in this square, its edges softened into beauty by the ineluctable weight of time. You can travel the world and never leave your sunny spot. Two girls chatter together in German. A family squabble in weary Romanian. Two young men share a joke in Urdu before splitting up to work the crowd from one side to another, selling frail plastic poles for phones.
Every empire ends, that’s Rome’s most obvious lesson. As though I were in any danger of founding a dynasty. If you go a little while not hearing your own language, you can pick it out at 100 meters, even when it’s the most widely spoken language on earth. For now. All empires end. The next gadget these itinerant hawkers shill might take its name from Mandarin or Hindi.
There is a busker just over there, in the shadow of the massive wedding cake monument. The type with a speaker. He’s good, and has drawn a crowd. The songs are in English, but everyone can sing along. The Beatles. Bob Marley. Phil Collins. Music is our…
