Arriving After Midnight
2025 June actually was my first time in Rome.
The taxi ride from the airport was our first reminder that traffic rules in Italy are, let's say, conditional. Taxi drivers seem to operate on a different level of judgement - one not necessarily informed by the signs. We remembered this immediately, and held on.
Then, instead of going to sleep, we went for a walk. It was well past midnight by the time we were out on the streets - and Rome at night is something else entirely. The monuments lit up, the old town nearly empty, that particular quiet that big cities only get in the small hours. Walking the streets, we noticed birds circling overhead, lit from underneath by the lights aimed at the ancient buildings - glowing white against a black sky.
Those four days were brutally hot. Well above thirty degrees - late June in Rome will do that - and we spent a good part of each day plotting a course from one patch of shade to the next.
Layers of History
What struck me most was the sense of accumulated time. Rome's history isn't a smooth line of continuous development - it's layers of building, ruin, and rebuilding stacked on top of each other. Massive structures, wide streets, amphitheatres. The Colosseum, not a stadium in the modern sense but an arena where people died for entertainment. And plenty of darker history since: Rome's Jewish community is the oldest in Europe, and in October 1943 over a thousand of its members were rounded up from the Ghetto and deported to Auschwitz. Fewer than twenty came back.
A Lithuanian Thread
There's also a Lithuanian thread running through the city. The church I couldn't name is Santa Maria in Via Lata, which since 1971 has been the Lithuanian national church in Rome - the Pontifical Lithuanian College of St. Casimir is nearby. We hired a Lithuanian guide, a woman living in Rome, who walked us around and told the kind of stories you don't get from a plaque.
The Pantheon
The building that fascinated me most was the Pantheon. Built by Marcus Agrippa, rebuilt under Hadrian around 126 AD, and still standing - it holds the record for the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome, nearly two thousand years on. You walk past those columns and you can read the age in the stone itself.
15 Kilometres a Day
We walked over 15 kilometres a day in that heat. Saw the fountains -including the Trevi, where the tradition is that a coin tossed over your shoulder brings you back to Rome, and two or three coins bring love or marriage. Ate well. Took a ridiculous number of pictures. I love the colour of the stone here: travertine and weathered brick, and in the sun it photographs warm in a way that's hard to describe until you see it.
We tried a couple of rooftop bars. The one we liked better was near the Vittoriano - the enormous white monument Romans themselves nicknamed "the wedding cake." Worth the climb for the view alone.
Food, Gelato, and a First Affogato
The food was as good as promised. Excellent bread, and we found a few small gelaterias - the kind of niche places tucked down side streets - serving genuinely outstanding ice cream. This was also where I had my first affogato: a scoop of gelato drowned in a shot of hot espresso, which is exactly as good an idea as it sounds. We tried limoncello too, the lemon liqueur from the Amalfi coast, served cold after dinner.
The Smallest Country in the World
We also visited Vatican City - not a city in any ordinary sense but a sovereign country, the smallest in the world at roughly 0.44 square kilometres. Walking through the Vatican Museums, the sheer density of architectural and decorative decisions is hard to take in. The Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment are Michelangelo's; much of the rest belongs to Raphael, Bernini, and a long list of others.
Writing This Late
I'm writing this more than a year after the fact, as part of rebuilding this blog on modern tooling and getting back to writing. A lot of what I knew right after the trip has faded. What's left is the photographs, and the moments that come back when I look through them - some of which might end up as somebody's desktop wallpaper.
