Educated

others to visit him in Rome during the spring holiday. “You can come, too,”
he said.
We handed in our final essays for the term, then boarded a plane. On our
first evening in Rome, we climbed one of the seven hills and looked out over
the metropolis. Byzantine domes hovered over the city like rising balloons. It
was nearly dusk; the streets were bathed in amber. It wasn’t the color of a
modern city, of steel, glass and concrete. It was the color of sunset. It didn’t
look real. Nic asked me what I thought of his home, and that was all I could
say: it didn’t look real.
At breakfast the next morning, the others talked about their families.
Someone’s father was a diplomat; another’s was an Oxford don. I was asked
about my parents. I said my father owned a junkyard.
Nic took us to the conservatory where he’d studied violin. It was in the
heart of Rome and was richly furnished, with a grand staircase and resonant
halls. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to study in such a place,
to walk across marble floors each morning and, day after day, come to
associate learning with beauty. But my imagination failed me. I could only
imagine the school as I was experiencing it now, as a kind of museum, a relic
from someone else’s life.
For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a
fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in
pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited
the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to
worship, to venerate. That was how I felt toward the whole city: that it should
be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My
companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but
not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not
silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next,
they debated philosophy—Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli.
There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they
gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their
discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing.
On the third night there was a rainstorm. I stood on Nic’s balcony and
watched streaks of lightning race across the sky, claps of thunder chasing
them. It was like being on Buck’s Peak, to feel such power in the earth and
sky.