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Preamble... or pre-ramble...
Dear Reader(s):
What follows is basically my recollections
of my wife's and my honeymoon trip to
Italy. It is more of a diary than
anything else, and definitely not a travel
guide. There are plenty of those around.
We used Rick Steves' Italy, having been
fans of the show on PBS. I can make
absolutely no claims to objectivity or
completeness - this is just an account of
what we did and what seemed interesting to
me about it.
I tend to experience travel as much or
more as an inward journey as an outward
movement in space and time. Different
sights, settings, and experiences
stimulate different thoughts about the
world, what it is to be human, how things
are the same, and how things are
different. I tend to be a fairly critical
person by nature, but my observations and
even frustrations are generally not meant
to be read as condemnation but rather some
combination of how I felt at the moment
and how I feel now as I write about our
trip. Even when I complain
about something, more often than not, I'm
inwardly amused by it and enjoying it as a
life experience in full acceptance of the
reality that not everything in life is the
way I think it ought to be.
I might also write - and probably -
complain about the same sorts of things
several times at different points in the
trip. Consider those passages to be
iterations of a leitmotif, a recurring
theme that brings the whole work together
as a unified whole.
Probably the strongest theme relates to
one of the intellectual reasons why I was
excited for this trip. The Roman Empire,
the Catholic Church, and the Renaissance
are three of the biggest influences on the
nature of the modern western world. Given
the global reach of the modern western
world's most powerful exponent (the United
States, duh), this implicitly means that
these cultural forces have defined or at
least informed an overwhelming majority of
human civilization in some way or another,
for good or for ill.
Before we set out on our trip, I had a
thought to ponder as we went: Are Americans
the "New Romans?" We certainly are and
have been the dominant force in the world
for a while. How long can Pax Americanus
last? What can we see in Roman history
that resonates with US history and
present? Are some pitfalls inevitable?
Did ancient Romans go on vacations and act like
total jackasses, I mean besides raping,
burning, looting, killing, and pillaging?
Despite being an account of a honeymoon
trip, what you read below is also probably
not going to tell you all that much about
how much I love Lillie and how wonderful
she is. You can probably infer WHY I love
Lillie from some of our adventures and the
in-jokes we formulated inside our mobile
mental honeymoon cocoon, though.
Lastly, this piece is somewhat long,
opinionated, and veers wildly between
simple observation, philosophy, anger, and
occasional gross humor and/or "too much
information." If you're squeamish, not
much of a reader, or just the less patient
sort, feel free to just look at the photos
we took.
Cheers,
Ethan
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