J.J. Jenkins is a business administration junior and a Mustang Daily study abroad columnist.
If I were an author staging the opening act of a grisly novel, the place I found myself on Thursday night would be the scene of the initial murder. A blank, marble atrium inside a nondescript building in the center of Rome greeted me as I looked for the mysterious Hostel Ivanhoe.
Even the name seemed to come out of a Dan Brown novel. A few hours earlier, I survived a flight on Ryan Air from Barcelona to central Italy (survived being the apt word for flying Ryan Air), setting off for a city even more foreign to me. Not to mention, on my own.
But with a vague idea of where the hostel was, I tracked down the Ivanhoe and prepared to see just what I had gotten myself into at a price of 12 euros a night. I scurried out of the unlit entryway, a little quicker than I would have otherwise, and made my way to the second floor where I checked in and surveyed my new digs; it was simply a room filled to the brim with bunks, but there was a sunken mattress with my name on it, which was all I needed for my weekend.
It looked like I’d live to tell the tale of my weekend in Rome.
Still, I had little time to waste and almost immediately headed out to meet up with Erica Husting, my fellow Cal Poly student and study abroad columnist, at the Colosseum.
The most striking part about Rome, as opposed to Barcelona, is the sheer amount of history that practically slaps you in the face each time you turn down a street. We wound our way past the Roman Forum — ancient ruins of the emperor’s estate — before turning to a stoic, bleached-white building that Benito Mussolini built in honor of the warriors who fought in the first World War.
In Barcelona, the relics of its Civil War are hidden, oftentimes just a plaque in an otherwise inconspicuous plaza. The headquarters of the communist party during the Civil War is now inhabited by an Apple store. A McDonald’s sits in the building where the president of Catalonia was murdered during the fighting in Barcelona. But in Rome, history is on full display.
So after grabbing pasta and gelato (what did you expect?) that put Spanish food to shame, we set off to see monuments at midnight along with Bobby, our de facto tour guide and sage world traveler. Turns out there isn’t a better time.
The Trevi Fountain greeted us with the loud splashing of water, the hoards of tourists that flock there during the day had left and we had the plaza almost to ourselves. There wasn’t much left to wish for as we tossed a coin into the water.
The Pantheon, a church that has stood for 2,000 years, was equally as deserted along with Piazza Navona, featuring epic fountains built by Lorenza Bernini in the 16th century. The sheer size of the stone monuments was baffling. They say everything is bigger in Texas, but I assure you, Rome would give it a run for its money. The gods’ sinewy calves and biceps the size of my entire body almost appeared to ripple with intricate lines and shapes.
I was in no hurry to get back to the rag-tag group that oversaw the hostel, but time was ticking away and we needed to get our tourist on the next day. My goal of the whole weekend was to spend the least amount of time at the Ivanhoe, so the next morning I kept my head low in an attempt to avoid awkward eye contact with people trying to change clothes underneath the sparse sheets on their bed.
The next few days were a whirlwind of the touristy spots in town including a tour of the Colosseum where my nerdy fifth-grade self reemerged with long-dormant information about the various types of gladiators that fought, sometimes to the death, in front of 75,000 spectators. My favorite was, and is, the retiarius, a fighter who relied on quick thinking rather than brute force when attempting to catch his foe in a net.
On Saturday, Erica, Bobby, a few others and I headed to the Vatican and waited in the most worthwhile lines of our lives. After an hour-and-a-half wait to get tickets for the Dome on Saint Peter’s Basilica, the group trekked up 551 steps, including sections where the walls tilted inward like a trippy Salvador Dali painting, to reach the highest point in the city.
Much like Park Güell in Barcelona, the entire city appears at your fingertips, making you stare in awe at what people, hundreds of years ago, crafted with expertise. Despite the impossibility of it, I attempted to drink in and absorb the moment, knowing the next time I will probably return, maybe in a decade or more with a family in tow, my life will have drastically changed. Moments like that are personal markers that allow you to reassess yourself, and the changes that have happened and will continue to happen. But for an instant, you can be stuck in time.
Those are the best moments — the moments that are impossible to capture with a camera.