​Another day, another ruin in Rome. Ho hum. Look at this one, another set of eroded columns-hey, a cat!​Oh look, another one. And another… wait, these are the best ruins ever! They’re full of cats!

Thanks, Wikipedia, for this picture of the cats!

That was pretty much my thought process when we stumbled upon Largo di Torre Argentina, a full city block of partially excavated remains of four temples, which have in the past been built over as churches and an opera house. You can read the Wikipedia page as well as I, I’m really here to tell you that there is an enclosed city block in Rome filled with dozens of cats. As it was a sunny day, they were all draped on the rocks or adorably curled up in the grass. For several exciting minute though, all the cats in one area sprang into action and one of them caught and tortured a large grasshopper, in the careless way that cats play with their prey.
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​On one corner there is an office and medical facilities for a volunteer organization which feeds, spays, and finds adoptive homes for the kitties. We went down for a bit to pet the critters, then went on to see Piazza Navona (many fountains) and the national museum in the Palazzo Altemps, which had lots of statuary and really excellent signage about which Greek bronze statutes they’d been copied from, and which limbs or heads had been added by later sculptors after the originals were lost. One particularly interesting piece was put together by a sculptor who added breasts to a male torso and used a head of Apollo to make a representation of Psyche, and added a female (Sappho style, apparently) to a male torso to create Eros. (Eros and Psyche is one of those complicated god and mortal love stories.) Apparently at the time they were into gender bending.
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​Yesterday we went for an early morning tour at the Vatican, which meant that we got up at 6 am, but also that we got to be the first tourists to walk into the Sistine Chapel that day. I’m not going to try to describe any of the Vatican. There’s no way. It’s so much so much. But yesterday I got a copy of The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain and started reading what he wrote about visiting Rome.
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​What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?–Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here.

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​That is fairly well what I have been thinking, but to read his vocalization of it, I thought about it a bit more, and perhaps this is the American way to approach it. So much of our national history is predicated on discovery–we celebrate Columbus and spend large portions of our schooling on the various explorers who discovered new lands. Now there is the modern recognition that indigenous people were there first, but we still fixate on the idea of going places that no one, or at least very few other people have ever been to. That’s the charm of travel, I think, that dies in Rome for Mark Twain.
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​From the New World perspective, we’re just not used to being one droplet in the endless wave of humanity that has swept over this metropolis for millennia.