All roads lead to…(Rome 04/14/2011)

Three coins in the fountain…

Rome has always been special to me. I studied Art History for nearly five years, in tandem with my undergraduate theatre degree, and a great many of those long months were spent staring at slides of Rome, letting my mind drift in the early morning hours, scribbling messages in the margins of my best friend’s notebook next to me, planning a trip to the Eternal City that we have yet to actually complete. We’d alternate between Rome and Venice depending on the course.

I finally got to Rome on my second contract, but only by means of becoming an escort on a passenger tour. Tour escorting is a great way of seeing things for the most part, but in a city like Rome it can be difficult to keep 60 passengers together on a walking tour, and I – not unexpectedly – ended up not seeing a great deal of the city for myself.

Naturally I was overjoyed that I would have a chance to return on my current ship.

You can’t understand the glory of Rome unless you’ve been there, and when you’ve been there, you understand just how intoxicating a city it really is, and somehow, it proved to be even more so, when I was seeing large portions of it through the eyes of a child. Two children actually.

Normally I try and avoid passengers on my days off, in fact, normally I try to avoid anyone on my days off. Some of my most joyous times have been spent wandering through history all on my own, pausing to take pictures when it pleases me, dragging my fingertips across stones and wondering who else has done so. In the world of ships, we spend so much time in constant contact with people, that when it comes to the few hours we get to ourselves, we tend to cherish the solitude.

Today though, I was invited by the few passengers on board that I actually consider friends: a family of five, that consists of a mum, a dad, a grandmother and two small girls. The girls have attached themselves firmly to the entire entertainment team, and being around them and their parents doesn’t feel like the work of being around “normal” guests. So, I pulled myself out of bed early, and at 9:30am found myself being pulled across the parking lot of the port by a small hand tucked into mine, on the way to the train for the hour long journey into a city that I don’t think will ever fail to catch my breath and touch my heart.

The coliseum reared up in all its ruined glory from moment we stepped out of the metro station – a $20 fee got us a tour that allowed us to jump the massive queue, and let us wander around inside at our own pace for enough time to glean some amazing photographs. It’s so easy to imagine that place as it once was, glinting and glimmering in marble, if you drop your eyes half-shut you can imagine that the throngs of people are another kind of crowd all together, and you swear you can hear the roars , both of the crowd and of the lions. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Shall you live or shall you die?

Down the street from the coliseum I finally was able to find out for myself that spaghetti tastes better in Italy than anywhere in the world. Especially when you’re eating it in a little tiny café, down a side street, off the beaten track, literally run by a family of three. I swear they must have hand-cut the pasta, I have never tasted anything like it. Nor do I think I ever will. The portions may have been half the size that you would be used to getting in North America, but you couldn’t have eaten any more than what they gave you.

After turning the map this way and that, we made our way through little winding size streets, past horses and carriages backing up against hacks and taxi cabs, playing daisy-chain with the traffic to cross the streets. Ultimately we climbed the Spanish steps and spent a breathtaking, though short, amount of time wandering through the massive park that is the Villa Borghese (no, I did not find the Galleria, though as it turns out I was within steps of it).

You couldn’t have asked for a better day, either in weather or in event. The sun glinted off the laughing waters of the Trevi fountain as the girls and I lined up in front of it to toss the requisite coins over our shoulders to ensure our eventual return.

I can only hope the magic of that fountain still works, because I can’t imagine a world in which I don’t return to Rome…