Dear Reader(s):

What follows is basically my recollections of my wife's and my honeymoon trip to Italy. It is more of a diary than anything else, and definitely not a travel guide. There are plenty of those around. We used Rick Steves' Italy, having been fans of the show on PBS. I can make absolutely no claims to objectivity or completeness - this is just an account of what we did and what seemed interesting to me about it.

I tend to experience travel as much or more as an inward journey as an outward movement in space and time. Different sights, settings, and experiences stimulate different thoughts about the world, what it is to be human, how things are the same, and how things are different. I tend to be a fairly critical person by nature, but my observations and even frustrations are generally not meant to be read as condemnation but rather some combination of how I felt at the moment and how I feel now as I write about our trip. Even when I complain about something, more often than not, I'm inwardly amused by it and enjoying it as a life experience in full acceptance of the reality that not everything in life is the way I think it ought to be.

I might also write - and probably - complain about the same sorts of things several times at different points in the trip. Consider those passages to be iterations of a leitmotif, a recurring theme that brings the whole work together as a unified whole.

Probably the strongest theme relates to one of the intellectual reasons why I was excited for this trip. The Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and the Renaissance are three of the biggest influences on the nature of the modern western world. Given the global reach of the modern western world's most powerful exponent (the United States, duh), this implicitly means that these cultural forces have defined or at least informed an overwhelming majority of human civilization in some way or another, for good or for ill.

Before we set out on our trip, I had a thought to ponder as we went: Are Americans the "New Romans?" We certainly are and have been the dominant force in the world for a while. How long can Pax Americanus last? What can we see in Roman history that resonates with US history and present? Are some pitfalls inevitable? Did ancient Romans go on vacations and act like total jackasses, I mean besides raping, burning, looting, killing, and pillaging?

Despite being an account of a honeymoon trip, what you read below is also probably not going to tell you all that much about how much I love Lillie and how wonderful she is. You can probably infer WHY I love Lillie from some of our adventures and the in-jokes we formulated inside our mobile mental honeymoon cocoon, though.

Lastly, this piece is somewhat long, opinionated, and veers wildly between simple observation, philosophy, anger, and occasional gross humor and/or "too much information." If you're squeamish, not much of a reader, or just the less patient sort, feel free to just look at the photos we took.

Cheers,

Ethan

My lovely wife Lillie, primary planner for the trip.

Everyone's a critic. Actually, at the Colosseum in Rome, a thumbs-down meant death. Makes Siskel and Ebert seem tame.

A copy of David in the square outside the Duomo in Florence. Renaissance art was one of things to which I looked forward the most, and I got several good eyefuls.

So, where am I heading with this...?

All material copyright Ethan Sellers unless otherwise indicated.