Rome is a beautiful, chaotic, dirty, wonderful, run-down, vibrant, and most of all historic city. You can walk for miles through twisted alleys filled with Vespa scooters, tobacconists, and cobblestones. You can also walk along miles of rather anonymous high rise apartment blocks. I’ve never seen a city quite so much like an ant-hill.
It’s also a city of monuments. Grandiose nineteenth and twentieth century structures are piled on top of medieval and roman relics. Two things really amazed me: First, everything is so damn huge! The shrine to Vittorio Emmanuel is the size of a skyscraper, the colloseum is overwhelming, and St Peters is simply the largest enclosed indoor space I’ve ever been in. It’s so big your voice doesn’t echo it just fades off into the distance. It think the place is large enough to have weather. And second, it seems as if there’s more ruins from more eras here than in all the other places I’ve been put together.
Which made me imagine the world fifty thousand years in the future. Humans will probably have been through a few cycles of boom and bust by then. It’s unlikely that anything will have completely wiped them out, but it’s also unlikely that we manage to escape some pretty bad (self-inflicted) disasters, either. So based on Rome I imagine the top few hundred metres of the earth’s surface will be solid human detritus. Bits of concrete, glass, metal and plastic that humans have fashioned into buildings or artifacts. Each with it’s story of a fallen empire, a human triumph, and the ongoing struggle to live and create and mold our environment.