Rome, at the end of the third day

2 pillars, Rome, originally uploaded by - di.

Roma, non basta una vita – Rome, a lifetime is not enough.
Silvio Negro, author and journalist.

It would be difficult to tell you what I love more about returning to Rome …

There is the fact that everything, and I mean almost everything looks like some hugely talented artist designed this magical city that persists in surviving the passage and ravages of time.

I photographed 2 stone pillars today, set against a wall, as pictured and voila, isn't it art?

... a street close to the Pantheon.

Or perhaps it the fact that when I arrive in the same trattoria for the second night in a row, I am greeted with a handshake, a two-cheek kiss and kindness. It's a marketing technique that works with me but then again, perhaps I am visiting a culture that naturally and effortlessly has this way of building a customer base.

It is the food … for sure, and the fact the red wine costs less than coca cola, and that it remains more than drinkable at that price.

Today it was about spending the day with a Canadian, an American and an Italian and being taught about the difference between gnocchi made with flour and the real gnocchi, made with potato; about being lost, and then found, and simply delighting in the photographic possibilities that all but overwhelm me, she writes on day when more than 200 photographs were taken.

It's about returning to a hotel room that feels like home after one night and about meeting a fellow New Zealander working in reception. His story of arriving in Rome was a truly interesting one.

It's about waiting for a table at my'local' trattoria and discovering that I am waiting with Aussies from Sydney who have just come from Istanbul – my 'old hometown', and about falling into intense conversation on that cool evening in March.

It's about feeling at home in the world while suffering from travel sadness, that peculiar condition where I realise that no one knows where I am and that I am meeting no one for dinner. It's when I'm not sure why I'm out here and I have no idea what drives this impulse inside of me that is all about leaving … since I was 3 years old and could climb the wooden gate back home in small town New Zealand.

It's about this feeling Rome gives me … a soul-deep feeling of meeting an old and favourite lover, about a city I simply adore because Rome deserves only adoration for remaining when so many things have changed. And remaining so beautifully Rome.

Ciao.