Roma, Italia
All you need to know about Rome is that everything is baked and lazy - including the people - and Italians are the worst drivers in the world, apart from ducks on speed, and Malaysians.
Ok, so that's not all. Truth be told, I don't really know where to start. I spent most of the holiday in a dazed open-mouthed stupor, trying to inhale the city. Rome is rust-coloured, but it's the kind of rust that incorporates blues, greens and purples while still managing to stay generally red. The result is breathtaking, and frustrating for the lack of my paintbox and palatte.
The streets are cobbled, and I imagined the history of sandals, togas and chariots seeping up through my feet. Everything's fairly modern, but Italians in business suits on mopeds will barrel down a street, passing houses, shops, McDonalds and a two-thousand-year-old monument, with equal impunity. Rome is pockmarked with little pockets of unprocessed history.
An aside: the world's worst drivers, but god, those rippling muscles, dreamy aquiline features, glistening Mediterranean skin...
...the sights, I'm telling you about the sights. Every sculpted statue, every slender column, every Latin word inscribed into rare marble: it all makes me yearn desperately for knowledge, or possibly an Italian art history encyclopedia. Everything means something, is symbolic, represents. I wanted to know it all, and that is why I'm going to go back.
Everything's so grandiose in Rome that you're always looking up, craning your neck into the angle of the midmorning sun above. But I have one memory of something underground: a couple sitting opposite us on the Metro, gesturing silently at each other. She, sporting a hearing aid and a disability, and he, who learned the language so he could speak past her disability. They spoke animatedly the entire journey, and walked out of the train at Termini, hands entwined. So small an incident, but it made me feel like the whole of Rome: warm and rust-coloured.
Italian food is the bomb. Also, I have now visited the smallest city in the world - and got thrown out of it. Hah!
I'll write more in the weeks to come, probably. As and when I think of things. Mostly I'll be speculating about when I'm going to go back, I think.