I have been studying and writing about Roman emperors for more than 30 years. I never imagined I would live in a time and place where the judicial system might give more extensive legal immunity to an American president than any Roman emperor ever enjoyed. Until last Thursday.

Contemporary imagination often assumes that Roman emperors enjoyed absolute authority to do what they wanted with their empire’s resources, wealth, and military power. They did not. Rather, Roman emperors were magistrates who held office for life, managing the Roman state on behalf of its citizens. This position gave emperors vast powers to initiate wars, choose administrators, appoint generals, order criminal investigations, and take the property and lives of convicted criminals. But, like their fellow citizens, Roman emperors were subject to Roman law.

Emperors themselves said so. In 429 C.E., the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III explained that “a reigning sovereign must be subject to the laws because our authority is dependent upon that of the law and it is the greatest attribute of imperial power for the sovereign to be subject to the laws.” It is only by accepting that laws apply to every Roman, the emperors continued, that we are able to “forbid others to do what we do not suffer ourselves to do.” In other words, an emperor claiming an exemption from Roman law had no right to expect his fellow citizens to obey those same laws.

A few decades later, Priscus of Panium, a Roman official and rhetorician who served as an ambassador to the court of Attila the Hun, explained to an acquaintance he calls Graikos why Roman legal procedures must apply equally to everyone. Graikos had once lived in Roman territory but had chosen to live among the Huns. He told Priscus he preferred the Hunnic empire, where, unlike in Rome, Attila limited corruption, did not assess high taxes, and presided over a people who did not trouble one another. True, the brutal barbarian king could do what he wanted to anyone. But Graikos still believed this was better than Rome, where “lawsuits are much protracted, much money is spent on them,” and everyone is distracted from doing what they want by concerns of when or even whether a legal penalty will be enforced.

Priscus corrected Graikos sharply. “Those who founded the Roman state,” he said, “ordained wise and good men to be guardians of the laws so that things should not be done haphazardly.” In Rome, “the laws apply to all, even the emperor obeys them,” and “the time taken in cases results from a concern for justice lest a judge err in his decisions.” Under Attila, by contrast, “one must give thanks to Fortune for freedom.” In a society without laws, Priscus asserted, your life and property are protected only by fate and the whims of Attila. Realizing his mistake, Graikos “wept and said that the laws were fair and the Roman state was good.”

It is, then, astonishing to read the April 25 transcript of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in Donald J. Trump v. United States. The day began with Donald Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, boldly asserting, “Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it.”

As the proceedings continued, the exchanges became increasingly shocking. At one point, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what would happen if the president “orders the military” to assassinate a political rival. In response, Sauer claimed that such an order “could well be an official act” and thus render the president immune from prosecution. Then, near the hearing’s conclusion, Justice Samuel Alito took on an incredulous tone as he asked the government’s lawyer, “If [the president] makes a mistake, he makes a mistake; he’s subject to the criminal laws just like everyone else?”

Any serious Roman jurist would know how to answer Alito’s question. They would respond as the 10th century bishop Nicholas of Constantinople did to the emperor Leo VI when he tried to get married illegally: “It is evil, a most evil doctrine to say that, because one is an emperor he is permitted to do wrong in a way that no one would permit his subjects to do.” Romans knew that even the limited liberty permitted by their autocracy depended on every citizen, regardless of their station, being equally subject to the protections and restrictions of a common legal system. To assert otherwise would be to leave the Roman world of law and enter the unpredictable, anarchic kingdoms led by people like Attila the Hun.

Alito is, without a doubt, a finer legal scholar than I am. But he is not a finer legal scholar than Tribonian or Papinian or many of the thousands of other jurists who taught and wrote about a tradition of Roman legal scholarship that stretched across nearly 2,000 years. These wise men refused to grant the powers to an emperor that Alito and Sauer seem to want to grant to an elected president. Maybe our Supreme Court could learn something from reading their work.

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A failed economic assault on ancient Rome offers a window into the possibilities and perils of this strategy.

This ancient case study begins in the late summer of 89 BC, when Mithridates VI of Pontus—the ruler of a medium-sized kingdom along the southern Black Sea coast (present-day northeastern Turkey)—declared war on Rome. The trigger had been a Roman ally’s recent raid on Pontus.

At the time, the Roman state extended from the Atlantic Ocean to modern Turkey, but its power was rooted in Italy. Mithridates lacked the military capacity to invade Italy or directly attack the city of Rome. Instead, the king decided to damage the Roman heartland indirectly by attacking buffer states that separated his realm from the Roman provinces along the Aegean coast, before breaking through into Roman territory outside Italy. Through these attacks, he sought to turn allied states against Rome, and disrupt the Roman economy.

Mithridates’ strategy unfolded across 88 BC. As his armies swept through Roman Asia Minor, they captured Roman officials, seized cities, and confiscated the local treasuries that supported the Roman regime. Then, once he had secured these lands, Mithridates sent out a letter that was received as an order to kill Roman businessmen, tax collectors, and government contractors whose fortunes depended on the Roman government’s activities in the region.

“With that one letter,” the rhetorician Valerius Maximus would later write, “he killed 80,000 Roman citizens, businessmen who were spread throughout the cities in Asia.” Other sources count as many as 150,000 Roman men, women, and children living in the cities and towns of Asia Minor who were rounded up and killed by people acting on Mithridates’ orders.

Forces loyal to Mithridates also attacked the Athenian island of Delos, the most important commercial port linking Italy with the Greek world. The geographer Strabo wrote that traders engaged in the import-export business “favored Delos,” but “it was frequented by Romans more than any other people.” The geographer Pausanias recorded Mithridates’ forces “put[ting] to death the foreigners residing” on the island before “plundering much of the property belonging to the traders.”

These attacks suggest that Mithridates targeted Roman business and commercial interests in order to chill the financial relationships that linked Rome to its provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean. All these murders of Romans abroad instilled fear—and also represented a direct assault on the economy of the Roman homeland.

First century Rome possessed an extremely sophisticated financial sector in which credit flowed easily, and wealthy people based much of their fortunes on their holdings of nomina, creditor notes that functioned like modern bonds. Romans could hold, sell, or exchange nomina with one another or cash them out, facilitated by bankers working in the Roman Forum.

This Roman financial system depended upon bankers correctly estimating the credit risk of individual debtors so that they could accurately price the loans they held or sold. This process worked well under normal conditions. But Mithridates murdered so many tax collectors, contractors, and traders based in Asia Minor and Delos that the nomina tied to business activities there lost all of their value at once. The sophistication of the Roman financial sector compounded the damage because these suddenly worthless nomina had been sold to investors, used as collateral to buy houses, and served to capitalize Roman banks. Massive amounts of wealth disappeared from Roman banks, investors, and property owners overnight.

The Roman economy crashed. In a speech delivered in 66 BC, Cicero recalled how “very many people lost large fortunes in Asia … there was a collapse in credit at Rome, because repayments were interrupted. Indeed, it is not possible for so many people in one state to lose their property and fortunes without the result that many others are dragged into the same calamity with them.” The historian Philip Kay has compared the financial crisis Mithridates caused to the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S.

But unlike the 2008 U.S. financial crisis, Rome’s public finances collapsed alongside its private wealth thanks to Mithridates’ economic warfare. Tax revenue collected by Roman contractors in Asia paid for the distribution of subsidized grain to Roman citizens, one of the few public welfare programs the Republic provided. With Asia occupied by Mithridates and Rome’s tax collectors murdered, the Roman poor faced a sudden disruption to the funds that ensured their food supply. Such a desperate sense of panic fell upon the city that a mob murdered one of Rome’s chief judicial magistrates when he tried to mediate a dispute between lenders and debtors.

Rome struggled to respond to this economic crisis. Its leaders introduced emergency measures to restrict the amount of debt lenders could take on and to compel lenders to renegotiate loans that could not be repaid. Rome also injected capital into the economy by minting large numbers of silver coins, some of which were made from bullion borrowed by the state from the treasuries of Roman temples as an emergency measure.

None of this worked particularly well. Then, as Roman anxiety and anger rose, the great commanders Marius and Sulla pushed Rome into a civil war sparked by an argument over who would lead the army against Mithridates.

It is hard to imagine Mithridates’ economic attack inflicting greater damage on the Republic. Yet ultimately, this economic war failed to defeat Rome. And it would end up in disaster for Mithridates.

Few Romans would have known the name Mithridates before 88 BC. But once Mithridates directly affected the life of every Roman citizen, the Republic had no choice but to pour their resources into his defeat. The Republic fought on, pushing back Mithridates from Roman territory and forcing him to sign a peace treaty in 84 BC.

Rome fought two more wars with Mithridates until 63 BC, when his own son betrayed him, and the old king killed himself so he could avoid being paraded through the city of Rome in a triumphal procession.

That would have been the only way Mithridates ever reached Rome.

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One enduring answer to that question lies in the ways that Romans responded after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths and their king, Alaric, in the year 410 CE.

That fall of Rome is among the most famous and closely studied attacks on a capital in world history. It also shares some key particulars with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Perhaps most notably, just as some American politicians spurred on the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, a group of 5th-century Roman politicians engaged in treacherous acts that eventually culminated in the attack on their capital.

Alaric’s final assault on Rome came after three years of failed negotiations over payment for past military services. Alaric had fought for the Romans in the Balkans upon orders from the emperor Honorius. But Honorius changed his plans and then refused to pay Alaric and his followers.

Early in 408, Alaric moved just north of the Alpine passes to Italy, and threatened to attack Rome if he was not paid. Honorius’s great general Stilicho convinced the Senate, which had grown increasingly involved in negotiations, to make some payment. But Stilicho’s support for paying Alaric aroused the suspicions of the emperor, so Honorius had Stilicho killed on allegations of having colluded with Alaric.

According to the Greek historian Zosimus, Alaric’s demands then changed; he wanted only a “moderate” sum of money, an exchange of hostages, and the concession of land in Pannonia (modern Hungary and parts of Austria and the Balkans) for his people to inhabit. Alaric marched through northern Italy to the walls of Rome unopposed. His first siege of the city in 408–9 brought suffering for the inhabitants. So, the Senate sent an ambassador to negotiate with Alaric and then voted to agree to his request. But Honorius and his courtiers kept delaying approval of the agreement.

In winter 409, Alaric seized Rome’s port, Portus, and its granaries. In a direct challenge to Honorius, the Senate, with the support of Alaric, recognized one of their own as emperor: Priscus Attalus. Then, Attalus installed a number of senators in prominent positions in his regime, although some senators, including the eminent Anicii family, refused to go along.

Attalus’s regime did not last long. After Attalus failed to defeat Honorius’s general in the province of Africa, Alaric removed his support for Attalus, who renounced his claim to the throne.  Once more, Alaric began negotiations with Honorius. The unexpected appearance of Alaric’s enemy, the Goth Sarus, who volunteered to fight with Honorius, disrupted what may have been the final resolution of the conflict; Honorius declared outright war on Alaric, who in anger turned against Rome.

For the third time, Alaric laid siege to the city.  No doubt, Honorius expected Rome would withstand another siege, and it may well have. But someone in the city—the culprit remains unknown—opened the gate for the Goths, and Rome fell.

“The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals” (1890) by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Alaric’s path through the city makes his anger at Roman elite institutions visible. His men targeted political centers. They set fire to the lush green park known as the Gardens of Sallust, which were part of the imperial properties. Then they advanced to the center of the city, plundering and destroying public buildings in the Forum, including the Secretarium off the Senate House. They then looted certain churches and private houses, taking with them as much gold, silver, and captives as they could. Priscus Attalus, his son Ampelius, and the senators who had supported his attempted regime change left Rome with Alaric after three days of violence.

In the shock that followed Rome’s fall, many Romans across the Mediterranean decried this violence to the capital of the Empire and found it easiest to blame the “barbarian general” Alaric. In North Africa the Christian bishop and future saint, Augustine, was among those who interpreted the attack as God’s punishment for the Romans caring too much about the present world. Blaming Alaric or God was also safer for the senators who wanted to remain in Rome.

Yet contemporaries and later Greek historians acknowledged that some of the blame fell on the senators themselves. The disloyalty of Attalus and his supporters had undermined Honorius’s efforts to restore his authority as emperor and weakened his claim to the loyalty of the Roman troops at a critical juncture. Attalus had put his political ambition above the security of the state.

Alaric departed the city on August 27, 410, and died unexpectedly in southern Italy weeks later. The Goths then headed west for Gaul, easing the Romans’ fears. Some of the senators who had fled Rome appeared in public in the city once more.

A number of senators who had been loyal to Honorius emerged to help rebuild the city. Senator Epiphanius, who was also urban prefect (a position akin to mayor of Rome), started repairs on a section of the Senate House that had been damaged in the attack. Another senator, Albinus, oversaw the restoration of the food supply, and Probus, a member of the Anician family who had returned to support Honorius, was put in charge of state finances.  Absent from any of these positions were the senators who had supported Priscus Attalus, and, we must imagine, those who had left with the Goths as well.

Honorius’s new general, Constantius, regained control of Gaul in 415 and captured Priscus Attalus and his followers, handing them over to the emperor. We can only imagine the conversations among the senators as they saw the chastened Attalus being paraded through the city. No one spoke publicly in Attalus’s defense—including the senators who had sided with him. There was no attempt at minimizing Attalus’s role in the coup, nor did the senators pretend they had not witnessed an attempted regime change by their former colleague. Rather, the full Senate and the emperor witnessed and approved Attalus’s public punishment—the removal of his thumb and forefinger, the digits used for speaking. Attalus accepted his punishment, and was exiled to the Lipari Islands. No one objected or appealed the sentence.

Our leaders would do well to reflect on these Roman exemplars. We do not have to remove the fingers of members of Congress who colluded with the insurrectionists. But politicians must publicly acknowledge their responsibility for the attack, including spreading the “Big Lie” about the election. And if they cannot acknowledge their guilt and accept the consequences and take steps to repair the damage, as the Roman Senate did, like Attalus they should be forced from the capital.

Only then can our representatives begin to rebuild the civility and public trust that once made the Congress a respected institution, and the Capitol a hallowed place. The Romans did it, and their Senate lived on for another 200 years after the attack of 410.  We should be so fortunate.

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For the worst afflicted, it was not uncommon that they would cough up or excrete scabs that had formed inside their body. Victims suffered in this way for two or even three weeks before the illness finally abated. Perhaps 10 percent of 75 million people living in the Roman Empire never recovered. “Like some beast,” a contemporary wrote, the sickness “destroyed not just a few people but rampaged across whole cities and destroyed them.”

Smallpox had hit Rome.

Infectious disease was long part of Roman life. Even the richest Romans could not escape the terrors of a world without germ theory, refrigeration, or clean water. Malaria and intestinal diseases were, of course, rampant. But some of the ailments Romans suffered boggle the mind—vicious fevers, wasting diseases, and worms living in putrefying wounds that refused to heal. The physician Galen would recall a member of the Roman gentry who accidentally drank a leech when his servant drew water from a public fountain. The 4th-century emperor Julian found it a particular point of pride that he had only vomited once in his entire life. By the standards of antiquity, this was a bona fide miracle.

But smallpox was different. Rome’s first smallpox epidemic began as a terrifying rumor from the east, spreading through conversations that often simultaneously transmitted both news of the disease and the virus itself. The pathogen moved stealthily at first, with people first showing symptoms two weeks or so after contracting it.

The plague waxed and waned for a generation, peaking in the year 189 when a witness recalled that 2,000 people died per day in the crowded city of Rome. Smallpox devastated much of Roman society. The plague so ravaged the empire’s professional armies that offensives were called off. It decimated the aristocracy to such a degree that town councils struggled to meet, local magistracies went unfilled, and community organizations failed for lack of members. It cut such deep swaths through the peasantry that abandoned farms and depopulated towns dotted the countryside from Egypt to Germany.

The psychological effects were, if anything, even more profound. The teacher Aelius Aristides survived a nearly lethal case of the plague during its first pass through the empire in the 160s. Aristides would become convinced that he had lived only because the gods chose to take a young boy instead; he could even identify the young victim. Needless to say, survivor’s guilt is not a modern phenomenon—and the late 2nd century Roman Empire must have been filled with it.

Most of all, though, the disease spread fear. Smallpox killed massively, gruesomely, and in waves. The fear among Romans was so pronounced back then that, today, archaeologists working all over the old imperial territory still find amulets and little stones carved by people desperately trying to ward off the pestilence.

In the face of smallpox’s sustained assault, the resilience of the empire amazes. Romans first responded to plagues by calling on the gods. Like Hierapolis, many cities across the Roman world sent delegations to Apollo, asking for the god’s advice about how to survive. Towns dispatched the delegates collectively, an affirmation of the power of community to stand together amidst personal horror.

And when communities began to buckle, Romans reinforced them. Emperor Marcus Aurelius responded to the deaths of so many soldiers by recruiting slaves and gladiators to the legions. He filled the abandoned farmsteads and depopulated cities by inviting migrants from outside the empire to settle within its boundaries. Cities that lost large numbers of aristocrats replaced them by various means, even filling vacancies in their councils with the sons of freed slaves. The empire kept going, despite death and terror on a scale no one had ever seen.

Roman society rebounded so well from smallpox that, more than 1,600 years later, the historian Edward Gibbon began his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not with the plague under Marcus Aurelius but with the events after that emperor’s death. The reign of Marcus was, to Gibbon, “the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” This historical verdict would have astounded Romans if they’d heard it back when they suffered through what came to be called the Antonine Plague. But Gibbon did not invent these sentiments. Writing after the turn of the 3rd century, the Roman senator and historian Cassius Dio called the empire under Marcus “a kingdom of Gold” that persevered admirably “amidst extraordinary difficulties.”

Cassius Dio witnessed smallpox’s effect in Rome when it killed most spectacularly. Dio knew its horrors and the devastation it produced. He also believed that the trauma of living through plague can be overcome if a well-governed society works together to recover and rebuild. And the society that emerges from those efforts can become stronger than what came before.

COVID-19 has brought about the first time that much of our world has faced the sudden, unseen, and unremitting fear of an easily spread and deadly infectious disease. Such a crisis can spur terrified citizens to blame each other for the suffering. It can exacerbate existing social and economic divisions. It can even destroy societies. But that need not be so.

The Antonine Plague was far deadlier than COVID-19, and the society it hit was far less capable of saving the sick than we are now. But Rome survived. Its communities rebuilt. And the survivors even came to look back on the time of plague with an odd nostalgia for what it showed about the strength of their society and its government.

May we be so lucky.

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It’s true that Rome, which has never been an easy place to make a living, is struggling these days. The economy is stagnant, I’ve never seen so many homeless people and beggars on the streets, and many Romans look visibly frustrated. It’s no wonder that populist parties are riding high. 

So why be here? Leaving aside the city’s superficial delights, like its superb climate and wonderful food, my own answer is simple:

History.

I am aware of no other great city whose past has been so well-recorded for so long. We have some idea—and often a very good idea—of what Rome was like, and what happened there, during each of the last 25 centuries. Nor, in any other great city, has so much survived physically from its past, through buildings and objects. If you know where to look, you can find souvenirs of the events that shaped Rome, allowing firsthand connections with great moments hundreds or thousands of years past.

I can give a few examples. In a modern hall at the back of Capitoline Museum are what look like weathered stone walls. One has been excavated, and you can see it descending deep into the ground. These are the foundations of classical Rome’s most important temple, to Jupiter Best and Greatest, which dominated Rome’s skyline for a thousand years. Created 2,500 years ago by the last of Rome’s early kings, Tarquin the Proud, the temple was partly responsible for his being the last king. Romans became so aggravated by the building costs that they rebelled and took power. Look at these piles of stone and you are looking at the moment the Roman Republic was born. 

Another temple built five centuries later—the Ara Pacis, or Temple to Peace—is in a much better state, having been painstakingly reassembled in the 1930s from scores of fragments. By the time it was built, Rome ruled the Mediterranean world, and the republic was dead. On the side of the temple, you can see a relief depicting—in their best and most fashionable togas—Rome’s ruler Augustus, his sidekick Marcellus, and their families and helpers walking in procession. It is a portrait of a new elite: the people who dismantled the Republic. In its place rose an unstable military dictatorship, whose administrations would often be decided by civil war.

If you visit the Museum of Rome near Termini station, you can capture the panic and anger during one especially important such regime change. A decade ago, during excavations of the emperors’ Palatine Palace, a scepter and two imperial standards were found. They had been carefully wrapped in silk and placed in wooden boxes. Dating work showed they had belonged to Emperor Maxentius, who at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge just north of Rome, was defeated by Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine. Looking at these objects, one can imagine the desperate moment when pagan Maxentius’s courtiers, learning that their emperor was vanquished and dead, hid his regalia of power to spite his successor. 

Rome has preserved its own defeats. In the city’s ancient Aurelian wall you can see the Asinarian Gate with its tall round towers. There, on a December night in A.D. 546, soldiers defending the city shimmied down a rope to search out the commander of their enemies, the Ostrogoth Totila, to ask how much he would pay for them to open the doors (he paid enough). Across the city, you can see the raised walkway leading from the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo, where, in early May 1527, Pope Clement VII ran for his life as Spanish and Lutheran German soldiers below took pot shots at him, and their comrades turned Rome into a slaughterhouse. And you can see the Papal Walls on the Gianicolo Hill, where in June 1849 Garibaldi’s soldiers heroically defended Rome in a hopeless struggle against a much superior French army. Though Garibaldi lost the battle, he won the war right there, as his forces’ courage gained sympathy around the world. Within a few years his dream of a united Italy, free of foreign rulers, was reality.

Or you can see the Balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, where, on the 10th of June 1940, Mussolini announced that Italy was at war with Britain and France (the crowd below was so unenthusiastic that a patriotic newsreel of the event had to be dubbed with cheers from sports events). And you can see the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, which was used as a torture center by the SS during Rome’s Nazi occupation. Now preserved as a warning from the past, you can read desperate messages scratched into the walls by those held there. 

For all this history, today’s Romans still aren’t impressed. “What use are monuments?” is a comment I have heard more than once. “Monuments are what’s dead and gone.” I disagree. I don’t believe that history repeats itself, as every age is different—but I do believe it can offer useful clues about human behavior. 

Romans have lived under every kind of political system, from oligarchy to theocracy, and from dictatorship and monarchy to democracy. Frequently they have lived under more than one at the same time. One can see Rome’s past as a vast case study of humankind and politics.

What can be learned from spending time among these relics? For one thing, they tell of the frightening chanciness of events. We like to think that great changes happen for important reasons—that they’re all but inevitable—but it’s rarely so. Huge and enduring transformations can come from the equivalent of a throw of a coin.

If Maxentius had defeated Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and had hung on to his imperial scepter, Christianity might never have dominated Europe as it did, and instead might have remained one religion among many. If Mussolini had not been tempted into war in June 1940 his dictatorship might have endured, ever more sluggish and corrupt, for another decade or two. And if river fog had not risen from the Tiber early in the morning of the 6th of May 1527, hiding the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s starving soldiers from Rome’s guns, Charles’s army would never have broken into Rome, the city would not have had to endure a horrific 10-month occupation, and Italy might not have been dominated by Spain for the next two centuries.

Rome’s monuments also hold warnings. However infuriating democratic government can be, beware of chucking it away. Once you start down the path to dictatorship you never know who you might get. Rome has been ruled by a paranoid schizophrenic (Caligula), a talentless wannabe singer (Nero), and murderers far too numerous to list—including some popes. For all their claims to efficiency, dictators rarely govern well. Mussolini despised the elected rulers who preceded him and yet, for all their faults, their rule was far more effective and less corrupt than his. Under democracy, Italy thrived economically and was well prepared for war. Under Fascism the economy stagnated and the country’s military was in a hopeless state.

Another warning that seems especially relevant these days is that democracy’s worst enemy is inequality. At the heart of Rome’s first Republic was a patriotic alliance between rich and poorer Romans. When the greed of the rich transformed Rome into a slave economy and the poor lost their role in society, they also lost a sense of connection with the Republic, and it died. 

But Rome’s monuments have some good news for us, too. Somehow, out of all of these wars and tyrannies and destruction there has emerged an extraordinary, fascinating, and beautiful city. The most important thing about Rome is that it endures. There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be.

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