Enchanted in the Eternal City
Including a good book about Rome
Of all the places we went on our trip, Rome was my favorite. That surprised me, even though maybe it shouldn’t have. I’m always saying I want more nature vacations, more small town vacations, more vacations to places I’d never heard of. I already live in the best city; I don’t need more of the megalopolis experience on my time off. So we went to Rome not because we were dying to see it, but because there is a direct flight from Mexico City, and I am committed to direct flights.
But within a few days I’d fallen in love, in much the same way I did 18 years ago when I got off another plane knowing almost nothing. Rome reminded me so much of Mexico City, and what it felt like to explore it for the first time. The chaos, the history, the potential for surprise, the feeling of never knowing what to expect. Rome, like Mexico City, felt like a city I could live in for the rest of my life and never reach the end of, never see everything it had to show me, never truly understand even a fraction was what was going on. It felt like another place that could unlock so many of the world’s mysteries, if only I could decode it, which I’d never quite be able to.
While I was there, I read a book that captures this feeling perfectly: Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr, recommended by my internet friend Clare. Twenty years ago, the author received a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, completely by surprise. And so, without thinking too hard about all the reasons not to, he and his wife moved there for a year with their six-month-old twins. The destabilizing and enchanting experience of new parenthood entwines with the destabilizing and enchanting experience of diving into the deep end of a new city, and especially the Eternal City, the city all the rest have been reaching towards for more than 2,000 years. Doerr tries, and mostly fails, to write the novel we know will eventually become All the Light We Cannot See, so overwhelmed is he by the wonder of daily life in a place where “the brittle crust of the present fractures; my feet sink into the quicksand of eternity.”
As in Mexico City, the past is always erupting into the present in Rome, but not in a way that makes you feel like you’re in a museum, where all the stories have already been worked out and are now frozen for your peaceful contemplation. In Rome, and in Mexico City, the past is constantly being reworked, literally and figuratively. The places that survive—the Pantheon, the Zócalo—do so by transforming to serve the present, even as their ghosts refuse to disperse into the realm of the forgotten. “Every era here, it seems, cannibalizes the previous one; everything is salvaged, recouped, reclaimed,” Doerr writes. The essence is never lost, even as everything else changes, almost right in front of your eyes.
In Rome, I felt like I recovered my capacity to be enchanted, my ability to pay attention, my willingness to venture out into the unpredictable. Rome makes it easy to do those things, but so does Mexico City. It’s why I keep coming back, or maybe never really left.
Further reading
I subscribed to many Italy travel newsletters before and during our trip, and far and away my favorite was Understanding Rome by Agnes Crawford. She tells exactly the kinds of stories that help me understand and appreciate places and objects I would otherwise overlook or skim over. Crawford also gives tours, which is on my list for next time!