Goodbye to Rome

Today is the day that I leave Rome. I absolutely cannot believe that my time here is already up! I still distinctly remember my first day here, the first time I got lost, the first people I met, the first "real" Italian I spoke...they are things that I will never forget. My time here has been amazing, stressful, and crazy all rolled into one. Rome is an extraordinary city, one that I still don't understand, and doubt I ever will. You can hate it or love it, and most of the time I hate it AND love it, the people, the public transportation, the everything. I know I didn't experience everything to offer here, but who could? This city is a secret to even those who have lived their whole lives in it.
As sad as I am to leave, I know that I will be back, and that keeps me going. I have to come back, to continue experiencing and attempting to understand just a little more what makes this amazing city "tick". Despite that, I am ready to go home. And excited to see friends and family!! Also, the use of simple appliances would be nice (like a dryer, microwave, or toaster for starters)!

“When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungus growth overspreading all its more admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs, --left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats,-- left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future, --left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,--when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Goodbye Roma! It has been an unforgettable experience.

And Ciao all! Thank you for reading all semester!