Travelogue: Rome

The bells of St. Peter’s ring on the hour; the sound seeping in through the wooden panels on keyhole windows and reverberating against the walls of my Spartan quarters, into my dreams, coaxing me back to Rome...

What else can one use to describe the city but “monumental”? It is here that one simultaneously witnesses the endurance of man’s achievements and the frailty of his desire for immortality. The grandeur meets the unsustainable, on chipped frescoes and buildings in various stages of decomposition. He wants to hold on these moments, to beauty witnessed or imagined, with walls hundreds of feet high or gilded wings and painted urns. To carve our very faces into stone and our passions into the earth, moving soil, separating dark from light, and putting color where there was none.