Foundations

The first time I visited Rome was at night. We stepped off the Metro, and there, pulling the dizzy swoop of headlights into its shadows, was the Colosseum. I wasn’t expecting it… at least not right there, looming on the corner of an intersection like a monumental affront to traffic. It stole my breath.

We chartered our own starry-eyed adventure—a right here, then a left, then a hop-skip-jump through this piazza. Jutting cobblestones and spindly alleyways were poems in the moonlight; you should know that Dean Martin’s “Evening in Roma” captures only a hint of the romance that lights the city after hours. It was the perfect Valentine’s getaway, oo la la and all.

So when we returned this last weekend, strollers and juice boxes and sunscreen in tow, I expected Rome’s beauty would fall a little flat. There’s only so much glamour to old rocks when you’re rummaging through sweaty backpacks for the baby formula… or so I thought. Turns out, I was delightfully wrong.

We started with the Old Appian Way, a road almost unbearably quaint and dotted with as many tombs as cypresses. Stone walls jutted out of the ground, just a whiff of the villas and mausoleums that used to reign over the road, and we peeked into a few crumbling structures to see steps leading down into the Catacombs. For an imagination junkie raised on stories of Sparatacus and martyred Christians, this place was a fairytale come true.

We picnicked in a half-hidden sacred field—shhh, don’t tell!—then walked from the pyramid toward Rome’s pulsing center. (Did you know Rome had a pyramid? I did not until it was suddenly there, shooting out of a million-way intersection.) One moment, we were on a roomy residential street; the next, we were racing strollers through the Circus Maximus (where charioteers once tried to kill Ben Hur*) with the imperial palace ruins filling the sky ahead.

From there on, each new wonder was overshadowed by the next. Constantine’s Arch, the Colosseum, the relatively modern monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, the shockingly ancient Roman Forum. It felt similar to entering the Louvre and seeing its incredible art life-size in front of me, except that each Roman structure was a hundred times the size of life, and then a hundred times more. It felt like trespassing on the celebrities of history.

The girls are still too young to understand the significance of this old world around them, but I like to think they absorbed a bit of the beauty. It would be impossible not to. And if nothing else, we fed off of each other’s excitement—mine and Dan’s at the thousand-year-old marble, Natalie’s and Sophie’s at the hours-old sunlight. We giggled and munched potato chips on a gnarled hilltop, and I found myself awestruck by us, the four of us, alive and adventuring together, laying our own foundation. And something told me that one day, not too many millennia from now, we will tip-toe back through the cobblestones and cypresses and sticky-fingers and strollers and whisper, “Wow.”

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* I’m all for historical accuracy here.