Last (lost) post about our time in Italy:

It's been a few years since this was written, but I'm finally going to pull the trigger on putting this out there - it gives an interesting wrap-up / perspective on our time in Italy, from 2010 to 2013. I just really like the writing I did in this piece, and figured that if anyone finds it, it might give some food for thought.

This post was written June 15th of 2013 - the kids and I left Rome a week later, with this post left unpublished. I don't know if I was waiting for other members of the family to write something or not; regardless, I didn't push the big orange "PUBLISH" button then.

I've kept the blog open (but inactive) for 3 reasons: 
I like to go back and read my posts. I'm quite proud of some of the writing that I did.

As our tour here comes to an end, I'm looking back over the past three years, and evaluating our time in Italy. Each of the four us will take very different impressions from our experience here, and I can only share my impressions, but I've posted some of them below.

While we've been here, we've had a lot of opportunities that a most of our friends would never even dream of, and seen some of the most beautiful and famous sights in the entire world. 

We've seen Michelangelo's David, widely regarded as one of the most perfect sculptures ever created. We've been to the Vatican (and Saint Peter's Square) several times, and celebrated Christmas Eve Mass with Pope Benedict in 2010 (at the service, we sat 2 rows away from Gabby Gifford and her husband, Mark Kelly). We've skied (and snowboarded) in the German Alps. We've been to the top of the highest mountain in Germany. We've visited the town bears in Bern, Switzerland. We've shopped at the famous Christmas Markets in Innsbruck, Austria. We've climbed 2 active volcanoes (Mt. Vesuvius and Mt. Etna). We've toured Neuschwanstein Castle. We've climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We attended EuroChocolate Fest in Perugia in 2010. We've toured a Greek town originally settled 2700 years ago. We've taken day trips to a town so old that the Romans, when they conquered it, called it "Old City". We've put over 30,000 miles on our car driving around Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and southern Germany over the past three years. We have seen the city where Archimedes supposedly created his Heat Ray to help defend the city from the attacking Romans in 214 B.C. We crawled all over ruins dating to 1000 B.C. We toured a villa that's over 1600 years old, with some of the most beautifully well preserved mosaic work I've ever imagined. We've toured the Colosseum, which dates back to 70 A.D., and the Forum, with some of its structures dating to 700 B.C.

We've seen the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon so many times that they're not even worth slowing down for - we've actually detoured around certain neighborhoods downtown to avoid the crowds around better known landmarks... but more about that later.

We've had some of the freshest, and most flavorful food I could ever imagine. While some of our favorite foods and vegetables haven't always been available, when they are available, they're straight from the farm - most likely within the last 48 hours. Olive Garden doesn't hold a candle to cuisine here, even if they do claim to send their cooks to Tuscany to learn how to cook "Italian" food.

We've been here through periods of civil unrest; a week doesn't pass without a strike or march of some kind - once a month or so, the transit workers go on strike for 24 hours, just to remind everyone that they're perpetually unhappy. Occasionally, the gas stations will close, due to either the gas station workers or the truck drivers going on strike. The myriad strikes are just accepted as a part of life here. There are demonstrations constantly. We constantly receive updates from the security division that some group or another is protesting something or other. The protests seem to go pretty smoothly most of the time - they have to be registered ahead of time with the police, and plenty of notice is usually given. Most of them are peaceful.

Libya is still going through some difficult times, but Moammar Gadhafi was a good friend to Italy (you'll have to research why, if you're interested. I never looked up the details of the relationship). Before he was deposed and executed, he would occasionally come to Rome to visit, and I can see the Libyan Embassy from our balcony. When he came to town, traffic would be more of a nightmare than normal, with police on every corner, all the way into our neighborhood. Our normal 45 minute commute (to drive 7 miles) would take an hour and a half or more those nights.

There were some Embassy bombings while we were here; not many of them, but enough to make us a little nervous (while trying to reassure our family and friends at home that it wasn't a big deal). 

As an American posted in Italy, there have been some cases where the differences in our two cultures have made us scratch our heads, and in some cases, figuratively have to pick our jaws up from the floor. I have tried to post the big differences either in this blog, or on Facebook, and I won't belabor those differences any more; what I want to address briefly is one of the more significant similarities that I've discovered between our cultures - completely and totally ignoring our own locality. Please allow me to explain...

Living in Italy, we have seen some of the most beautiful and famous sights in the world - several of them are listed in the bestselling book from a few years ago, "1,000 Places to See Before You Die." We've seen some of these locations so many times, that we fail to even notice as we pass them by, and most of the Italians we know are so jaded that they haven't even bothered to go visit any of the sites that are within an easy day's drive. When I first heard this information, I  figured that it was an anomaly, but I've come to find out that it's more the rule than the exception. The only way that I can explain it is that constant exposure to all of these historic sights seems  over the years to have fostered in them a complete and total lack of respect for these same treasures (thankfully, this attitude seems to be changing over the last few years).

Rome is among the dirtiest cities I've ever been in - not by any means the dirtiest, but it's in the top 3 or 4.  Over the centuries, untold years of pollution, passive ambivalence, and acts of active defacement have taken their toll on some of the greatest historic treasures of the Western world. The Colosseum is falling apart (and has had blocks of granite removed for use on other buildings). The stains from pollution are so thick on some of the buildings that it's against the law for it to be removed in some cases, for fear of damaging the integrity of the buildings with the in-depth cleaning that would be required. There's a horrible problem with graffiti here, and it took an ex-pat American to start a grassroots initiative to "Retake Rome" and clean up the city. But Rome didn't get this way overnight. This could only have come from centuries of ambivalence.

All of this made me think about what kind of respect we (as Americans) treat our homeland with. We have been given custody of (what I believe to be) the greatest nation in the history of the world, but how many of us bother to open our eyes and appreciate what's right around the corner from us? For instance, how many of my Texas readers knew that Round Rock and Williamson county have been inhabited since 9,200 B.C.? Or that the skeletal remains of The Leanderthal Lady found in Cedar Park in 1983 are (or should that be "is"?) one of the oldest and most complete skeletal finds in the United States?

How many worthwhile things are we missing and not taking care of, simply because we're too familiar with our surroundings and have become jaded? Are we any better than the Romans? What will our country look like 2000 years from now? What will it look like 500 years from now? Please understand, I'm not taking an extreme left-wing ultra environmentalist stance (I'm still comfortably on the right side of the spectrum), but there has to be some happy medium, or I fear our country and our culture won't make it another 1763 years. The Romans, for all intents and purposes, sure didn't.