# Rome, Lost in Time

Published October 11, 2026 by WanderWork
Source: https://wanderwork.io/blog/rome-lost-in-time

> As I sipped a magnificent red wine and looked down one of Rome’s wide avenues, lined absurdly with tourist souvenir shops and two-thousand-year-old monuments, I was struck by the strange feeling of being lost. I don’t mean simply lost in the streets of a foreign city, though I was probably that too.

As I sipped a magnificent red wine and looked down one of Rome’s wide avenues, lined absurdly with tourist souvenir shops and two-thousand-year-old monuments, I was struck by the strange feeling of being lost. I don’t mean simply lost in the streets of a foreign city, though I was probably that too.

I mean lost in time. Rome seemed delightfully preserved and completely alive, ancient beyond comprehension and yet moving at the pace of the modern world. Sitting there, I felt something like nostalgia for a place I had never known and a time in which I had never lived. And no, this was not merely the male urge to think about the Roman Empire. It was something deeper.

For a moment, the centuries seemed to collapse into one another. I could almost feel the Etruscans and their beautiful, strange rituals; Romulus and Remus and the first fratricide on the Palatine; the roar of the Colosseum and its savage entertainments; Caesar, Antony, Augustus; the life and death of the Nazarene; the rise of the Church and the Holy See; the long centuries of decline and rebirth; the Renaissance; and, much later, the black shirt fascist marching beneath monuments already ancient when they learned the lesson. That empires end. The shadows of shadows of dead great men. For one impossible moment, they all seemed present there, outside that little corner cafe. Kings and priests, murderers and saints, emperors and artists, the forgotten millions who had crossed these same stones before me.

They crowded around that little café beneath the Roman evening, each belonging to a different century and somehow to the same city. And in my imagination, they all raised a glass with me to Rome, the Eternal City upon the seven hills. For a moment, it seemed she raised theirs too.

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