Rome the Open Air Museum

The city of Rome is exhilarating in many ways. There’s always something going on, always something there to look at. But every time we take the train into Termini(the train station in Rome)it’s easy to see people trying to get from point A to point B.  They go down into the underground and emerge at their stop in a rush not looking from side to side.  Instead they look at the people more than the sites.  I wonder 'Do they even look around anymore?' Is it all old news to them; living in one place for so long everything in it seems normal.  People would obviously cease to notice things as they have spent the years prior noticing them.  They walk by without glancing at anything that surrounds them.  And there really is so much just out in the open without the cover of museums or concrete buildings.  The new Rome is created with the old Rome.  Everything is incorporated and the old buildings are transformed to be put into practically use.  And this to Romans may not be exhilarating anymore.  The feelings could have worn away.  

The feelings are new to me though.  I have my camera out.  I’m taking pictures of places, statues and ruins as I walk, not caring if I stand out because of this(I do feel like many other people are doing this though).  Because I really haven’t seen anything like what I have seen here.  Not in real life anyway.  I don’t feel oppressed here.  I don’t feel stifled, I feel like I have the ability to do and see what I want to see.  Everything is out in the open, and Rome seems to exist as a giant museum.  The only museum I can think of in Ohio is the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Something I feel Cleveland constantly advertises. Here you’d run into them by accident, not even realizing what they were because they aren’t billed the way they are in the US.  Because there are just so many of them. 

We visit site after site, museum after museum so much so that there’s too much to look at.  Every room is covered in art.  The walls are frescos and stories of the founding of Rome.  There is pottery in glass cases, and bronze statues standing in the middle of rooms. There are huge statues on buildings and so many fountains with sculptures that I have lost track. I attempted to take pictures of everything I saw to send to people back home to say ‘look, this is what I saw.  This is the art that is over there.  These are the statues and fountains’ But I feel almost defeated in this purpose.  As though I never had an actual chance at succeeding in this.  Because there is literally too much to take pictures of.  I got tired half-way through the Capitoline Museum; every time I looked behind me there was more, and every time I advanced into another room there was more.  It was exhilarating and exhausting.  I’m sure that that is the way it is supposed to be though.

Rome is a city that is always and forever rearranging itself to suit a better and more useful purpose.  They utilize what they have.  They’ll take the time to recreate an old building into something that has a modern use.  And in doing this they are preserving who they were.  They are keeping the city as an open air museum very much alive. We don’t do that in the US.  If something is old, we knock it down and build something new in its place.  So to see all these structures still standing after all this time, it is exhilarating, exciting because it is like looking into the past of a culture.