I’ll admit that I was not inspired to write anything until I woke up on my 10th day in Rome. Perhaps I can blame it on jetlag, that my mind had finally made the journey from the bland land of Irving, Texas to the lively eternal city of Rome.

First move of the morning: reach for my digital camera. Please, don’t roll your eyes—I do not merely see the world through a 2-inch LCD screen, I promise. Rather, I use it as a tool to capture beauty, to record events, to have something tangible to look on one day when the experiences of my youth fail to surface. Forgive me for my digression…

I begin to scroll through the pictures from my semester thus far and of the crazy night that preceded me: “La Notte Bianca”. The memory, of which I should be thankful, dripped back into recollection like that Saturday night’s Tuborg on tap. I found myself pulled by a friend in a blue dress throughout Rome and the crowds of enthused Italians, all celebrating the wonder of the surrounding city. And what a cause to celebrate! Imagine tripping over the cobblestone streets to look up at the Pantheon or the Colosseum—myself, a beer-buzzed citizen of the 21st century, gazing up at an architectural marvel that has not lost its appeal since before the time of Christ. Perhaps it did not hit me then, but that morning, in my bed, I was most certainly sobered up to my current fortune: the living, historical city of Rome. We can walk the streets and live around the same context of Julius Caesar himself, all while listening to our ipods and eating McDonalds! While I might not suggest allowing the latter two actions to stand in your way of truly experiencing ancient beauty, the possibility of that amalgam is beautiful. We, in our self-centered, modern-day selves, can find this portal back to the early Roman times. We do not need a photograph back to their memory, for we have the tangible evidence still standing.

My photographs, while admittedly blurry and not artistically intriguing, do serve their purpose. I will forever be reminded of the large and inspired crowds, the inability to find a metro-stop which prompted our three-hour stumbling tour (in which we accidentally saw nearly all of the city’s landmarks), friendly Italians who helped point us on our way, and the truly eternal Rome.