Stories and Traditions Journal 1

How has your class in the morning impacted your sightseeing in the afternoon?

"Getting to know Rome, we come home to ourselves, our labyrinthine and surreal undergrounds of memories and desires and failures, the partiality of our abstract and absolute convictions" (Cahill xiv).

Coming here was easier than I had thought. I was ready for departure day, but I knew I would feel slight tugs at home as I left. I had an emotional goodbye with my parents, but after that, it was all Rome, all the time. My head buzzed so much with excitement that I slept under an hour on the plane. I had been trying to get here my whole life.

Growing up with both sides Italian, the goal of my life was made clear to me at a young age. "When are you going to Italy?" whined the hefty great-aunts at family reunions. This question usually preceded, "Do you have a boyfriend?"

Many of my younger relatives had been to Italy, and I saw pictures and had been preparing for these first few days for my whole life. When the plane touched down in Italy, all I could think was that I had returned to the madreterra, the homeland. The word 'return' implies previous presence in an area, but this was my first trip out of the country. I found it interesting that we talked about our homes in the first class, because I had been equating this place with my home from the beginning. Almost immediately, I felt an overwhelming peace in Italy.

With this new discovery in tow, I visited the Colosseum and the Forum. I was awed by the height of the Colosseum and saddened at the remains of the once-great Forum, but I also kept thinking of the people that were visiting this place, my Roma. I saw Chinese people, native Italians, Germans, young, old, all who had come to Rome for a specific reason, as I had. The Italians attempts to answer this by summarizing the general reasons of people in certain time periods. There are currently only about 2.5 native Italians for every one tourist, Barzini notes.

What has called people so strongly to this city over the years, just as it has called all of us? Travelers once faced bandits, avalanches, shady innkeepers, and sudden warring on paths to get to Rome. Many were after indulgences. Others were attracted to Italy's "slightly irreverent" paganness. Young men were sent to Italy to become cultured and to learn how to be gentlemen. Tourists still poured in when "Sicilian gangsters" posed threats. Many artists came to Rome to be inspired by previous art and to let that inspiration flow through their own brains, which allowed them to create. For instance, Winckelmannn's neo-classic style influenced Goethe to convert it into literary, poetic, and philosophical ideas.

But the reason I most identify with can be expressed through Hawthorne's final conclusion of Rome. Though he disliked Rome at first, he came to realize that Rome for him was even more familiar than his real home. ". . .when we have left Rome in such a mood as this we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that our heart strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born" (Barzini 40).