In Praise of Doing Nothing

Relax: Rome Wasn’t Built to be Seen in a Day

Most of us who have lived in Italy for a while have had this experience:

A friend of a friend is planning a trip and gets in touch to ask if there’s anything they should add to their week-long itinerary that already includes Rome, Florence, and Venice.

“I’ve got three days in Rome,” they might say. “Should I use one of them to make a day trip to Pompeii?”

I’ll sigh and say, “No, don’t go to Pompeii.”

“Really? Then what? Amalfi?”

“No, no, spend the whole time in Rome. Or in Florence or Venice if that sounds better. Or go to Abruzzo instead, or Trieste, or Calabria.”

“But it’s my first trip. I really want the Italy experience.”

I always want to ask, what is the Italy experience?

In praise of doing nothing (Kenny Zhang photo)

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Sacred and Modern Rome

I’m a collector by nature, ever since I was a kid. There’s a bookcase in my house that holds my favorite novel as a teen, The Catcher in the Rye, in more than 70 different translations. I have more bottles of wine than I’d care to admit. Ancient coins. Art about Rome. Watches. Exotic chess sets. Books and more books.

Two shelves are filled with old guidebooks, and one of the oldest of them -- a leather-bound volume called Roma Sacra, e Moderna, from 1725 -- says it takes three days to visit the Colosseum and two more for Piazza Navona or the Spanish Steps. It suggests twenty-eight days to correctly experience the Vatican (to be fair, it also recommends bringing a letter of introduction from a Bishop, in Latin, and arriving with a personal valet -- yes, it was a different time).

The 300-year-old guidebook, Roma Sacra, e Moderna (EJL photo)