Be Still My Beating Heart

My father is the quiet philosophical type.  Once, while I was road tripping with him through an especially picturesque part of America, he turned to me, as we were ginning down the highway, and said, “The really interesting thing about traveling is that it gives a person the opportunity to realize that the place he’s from is not all that special or pretty.”

I recalled his comment during a recent trip I took with Azza to Rome, Italy.  As my father had aptly noted all those years ago, The Eternal City is the sort of place that could make any traveler see his hometown in a new light.  Every city I’ve ever lived in pales in comparison to Italia’s capital.

When one family member asked me to sum up my feelings about the city at the conclusion of our trip, I replied, “Walking around Rome is like taking a stroll on a movie set, one built for the most romantic film of all time.”  The experience of visiting the metropolis is somewhat unreal.  How could a real place, where real people live and work and do all the mundane things that real people have to do, be so outrageously beautiful?

The pictures I’ve included here don’t do the city justice, but that’s not a surprise because travel pictures can never capture what the photographer was thinking and feeling about his subject at the moment the image was forever captured.