The Colosseum

So many things a person waits for in life just turn out to be disappointments. The amount of anticipation and gift wrapping our imaginations carefully layer on top of the things we long to do or see frequently somehow diminishes the experience itself. When we reach that place or have a chance to do the thing we've always said we want to do, how can it live up to all those long-held dreams?

I have wanted to see the Colosseum for a long time. It has, in fact, been on my "list" for some time. On my recent trip to Rome, I had a chance to take a tour of it. Despite my many hours thinking of it and all the times it has shown up in film and drawings, it was more impressive that I ever could have imagined.

Just stepping into the cool shadows under the main seats and running my fingertips across the support columns made my breath catch. How many hands over the centuries have trailed fingertips there? What noble and awful things have resonated through those stones, those bricks, and that mortar?

Emerging into the sun again, I saw the vast bowl of the stadium itself open before me. Words fail. I tried to capture it with photographs, but there is no angle perfect enough, no lens ground well enough to show the heart-elevating majesty of the engineering, the beauty of brick and marble made perfect and true even after the ravages of the centuries. Right behind that emotion, though, comes the reminder of what it was built for, and a whole new set of feelings sweeps in. The eye is drawn irresistibly to the great metal cross that crowns the place where the jaded and self-proclaimed divine emperors of Rome once sat to watch the deadly entertainments that sated the lusts of their people, a fitting place for it, like a crucifix used to slay a monster, perhaps.

I clicked off photos from every angle, even a rare one of me standing in front of it. I want to remember always that I was there. For me, the Colosseum is both the best and the worst that we are capable of being. I have seen it with my own eyes now, laid my fingers on its bare and poignant bones, and I think that the sheer power of the place, both the great and the terrible, will always be a part of me.