The Eternal City
Trip Start
Apr 15, 1981
1
10
16
Trip End
Jun 30, 1981
Rome,
Lazio,
Italy
Saturday, May 9, 1981
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, with its abundance of natural beauty, was a blessing, yet nothing I experienced there could prepare me for Rome. Mindful that the oldest man-made structures in Vancouver and Victoria are at most a hundred years of age, the ruins of Imperial Rome are twenty times older! Nothing made this more clear than my first sight of the Colosseum. I was sitting beside our guitar player, Bernardo Bulnes from Monterrey, Mexico, as the bus approached the old city centre. Bernardo had been to Roma only two years before with his father on a business trip; he gave me a description of what we were about to see and updates as to how close we were getting. By the time the bus rounded the last corner, I was coming out of my skin with excitement! I was not disappointed: The Pantheon, Spanish Steps, Michelangelo's Pieta, Da Vinci's Moses and the vast array of ruins and antiquities. An historian's paradise!
