On this website, I encourage visitors to look beyond the ruins of over-trodden tourist sites and to discover Rome’s many hidden layers, both the tangible layers and—even more rewarding--the intangible ones. No less a figure than Sigmund Freud was captivated by Rome’s layers, sensing the immensity of the city as an ineffable concept, almost as if it were a sentient being, and he approached it with no little trepidation, comparing Rome to the human mind, where many levels of memory can coexist in the same physical space.  Indeed, by uncovering and contemplating the city’s multi-faceted strata, we can encounter our own personal history and realize our essential interconnectedness with the legions of people who lived and died there.

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For the mindful tourist, travel is not a race to check off popular sites on their “bucket list,” but rather is a unique opportunity for greater self-knowledge. And there is no grander venue than Rome for self-reflection and meditation. In his Letters from Italy, the renowned eighteenth-century writer, poet, and statesman Johann Wolfgang Goethe—one of the greatest intellectuals of his times—wrote how his first visit to Rome in 1786 was so profoundly life-altering: 

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"Now I have arrived, I have calmed down and feel as if I had found a peace that will last my whole life. Because, if I may say so, as soon as one sees with one’s own eyes the whole which one had hitherto only known in fragments and chaotically, a new life begins…[Rome is] a whole new city which the imagination will never encompass, however long one thinks and dreams." (Italics added.)

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Remarkably, Goethe’s wisdom holds true today, and although he didn’t say it in his letters, he probably would have agreed that Rome is as good a place as any to wait for the end of the world, helped along, of course, with the excellent food and wine at its many restaurants and cafes, which this website also reviews. When asked at the end of Fellini’s 1972 movie Roma why he, an American writer, had decided to live and die in Rome, Gore Vidal, world-weary and light years beyond Goethe’s romantic idealism, put forth with characteristic cynicism an insightful summary of the simultaneous transcendence and absurdity of Rome:
 

"…Rome is the city of illusions—not only by chance do you have the church, the government, and the cinema. They each produce illusions, like you and I do. We’re getting closer and closer to the end of the world because too many people, too many cars and poisons, and what better city than Rome, which has been reborn so many times. What place could be more peaceful to wait for the end from pollution and over-population? It’s the ideal city for waiting to see if it will really come to an end or not…"
 

It should be noted that, in true Roman tradition of juxtaposing life’s suffering with its pleasures, Vidal delivered his gloomy disquisition at an al fresco dinner with friends at one of the many ristoranti surrounding the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the famous twelfth-century mosaics on its facade shimmering in the evening dusk. This church was the same magnificent backdrop 600 hundred years earlier, when terrified supplicants, many sick and in extremis, crowded into its sanctuary to pray for deliverance from the Black Death, huddling among the basilica’s majestic granite columns. These columns, probably hewn in Egypt, originally stood in the library of the ancient Baths of Caracalla, and in the church they support an elegant architrave composed of ornate fragments harvested from the nearby ruins of the Temple of Isis. This is the magic of Rome: raids, ruins, rebirth and reincarnation, all repeated many times over. The imposing columns in Santa Maria in Trastevere originally sheltered ancient Romans taking a break from the baths to peruse manuscripts of the Greek philosophers, while nearly a millennium later, these same columns, purloined from Emperor Caracalla’s grand baths for the new basilica honoring the Blessed Virgin, mutely witnessed the desperate entreaties of victims of the plague. Nowadays the columns gaze down upon tourists Instagramming selfies with the church’s magnificent apse mosaic in the background.
 

This website is intended for travelers whose first instinct on entering a church or museum is not to start taking photos, but to stop and ask questions of the beauty before them. What does this mean to me? What did this mean to them? What will it mean to those in the future? The visitor to Meditations on Rome should be receptive to learning how Rome is much more than a tourist destination, but rather is a concept which affects us even today, providing singular joy and quiet solace in the weary sojourn of life.