Rome (If You Want To)

Alley and I got a chance to visit Rome in 2017.

I had just finished listening to an audiobook by Mary Beard, read dozens of pieces on Rome, and watched a ton of documentary videos in anticipation of our trip. This would be my third international trip, but only the second country I’d visit outside of the US, with two visits to Brazil coming over a decade earlier.

I’ve since learned ten times as much as I knew before our trip, largely because there’s just so much to learn about ancient Rome—and because being there and seeing everything was fertile ground for my curiosity.

As an analog for where we find ourselves today, historians and scholars keep turning to the Roman Republic and subsequent slide into Empire.

Far from being an idyllic period of democratic governance, the Roman Republic was riddled with internal power struggles, social conflicts, and a gradual, inexorable slide towards autocracy. Instead of stable serenity, a complex political landscape evolved, where the lines between republic and empire were constantly blurred.

It isn’t like Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and Rome suddenly became an empire. Rather, it’s the previous centuries of setup that make it all so fascinating.

No actual arches were crushed in the making of this photo:

Besides the political history, there are plenty of other truly fascinating things about this city. Rome’s origin story involves fratricide, which I described like this:

In a moment of anger and frustration, Romulus murdered Remus, a deed that would forever cast a shadow over his legacy—and over the city that followed. Romulus became the sole founder and the first king of the new city, which he named Rome, after himself.

Under Romulus's rule, Rome began its ascent to power, and the Roman monarchy—the earliest of three forms of government for the city—had begun.

I mean, not really. None of this happened.

Besides the rich origins and dramatic story of individuals lusting for power, we were deeply interested in the perspective of the typical Roman citizen, not to mention its large slave population. Wrapping our heads around the way people lived involved us doing a lot of doodoo diligence, literally: we got to learn how the Romans pooped!

Rome was overwhelmingly fascinating to walk around in—here was a modern apartment right next to a two-thousand year old structure. There were the Pantheon and Colosseum, two of the most famous (and fascinating) buildings in the world.

There was just too much, so we decided to make a game of it. We pretended like everything was really, really lame and boring for all of our photos! I hope you enjoy some of these and take them in the spirit in which they were intended: completely ironically, and with grand respect for the traditions and history we were studying.

Oh, someone climbed up there like two thousand years ago and… wait, how did they do that?

Here’s Alley, very much in the spirit of the game (her idea in the first place!), out in front of the Colosseum:

This is one of my favorite pictures from the whole trip, where I pretended to be a normal American and got super excited about finding a Burger King in Rome:

This contrasted well with the ultra-bored pics of simply stunning things, like this incredible staircase at the Vatican, built so the Pope could enter the building on horseback:

Ugh! So lame and boring!

Can’t believe they never fixed this old Forum up:

In the ensuing near-decade since our trip, I’ve thought and written a great deal about Rome’s past. You can find all of those articles here, should you be interested. There are more pics, too—but you’ll have to hunt a bit.