The highlight of Rome for me was seeing the Pantheon. I’d seen pictures and video, and I’d read about it in travel guides and the like, but never saw what the big deal was. More than anything else I’ve seen, it’s something you have to see in person to appreciate.

Even after seeing it in person, I couldn’t tell you what the attraction is. Sure, it’s the best-preserved ancient building in Rome. And the dome is impressive in the abstract, as an engineering concept: we’re told that by the time of the Renaissance, people had lost the technology to build a dome like the Pantheon’s. But that’s the kind of info that impresses historians and people who write travel guides (and, I’m presuming, Renaissance engineers). It doesn’t explain why you can walk into the building as a tourist in 2009 — one who’d been to Disney World, even — and still be struck dumb by it.

I can only conclude that there are still ancient spirits inside.

At the other end of the reverence scale is the Trevi Fountain, a bombastic display of excess and aqueducts that is perpetually overwhelmed with mobs of tourists. And yeah, it is kind of a garish tourist trap — the part of Rome that feels most like Disney-fied Las Vegas — but I still dug it. Gelato-sucking crowds and all.

When I was in Paris, I was turned off by all the monuments, arches, fountains, and statuary: it felt ostentatious (which was the whole point), but cold and unnecessarily off-putting for anybody in the 21st century. Paris — like Venice, in my opinion — doesn’t feel like a real place, but a theme park. Almost everything in Rome felt like people actually live and work there, coexisting with sights and monuments from the past 2500 years and, most likely the next 2500.

Apart from the Vatican and the Colosseum/Vittorio Emanuele area, there aren’t any huge stretches of land set aside just for show. You can be standing in front of any of the tourist traps in the city, turn your head 90 degrees and realize, “hey, somebody probably lives right there.”

More vacation pictures are up on Flickr, this set including the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, and the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Also: while I was at the Pantheon, I kept trying to come up with a dirty joke about the HBO series Rome, but it never quite materialized. It involved graffiti and a picture of Octavia that said “Marcus Agrippa did this.”

Hey, I got back from Italy last week! I realize the internet has come to a standstill waiting in breathless anticipation for me to report back.

Before I left, I imagined I’d be keeping an online travel journal, blogging about the trip as I went. I pictured myself sitting at a cafe, sharing illuminating photos and tapping my profound insights and observations into my laptop as locals strolled past, fascinated by the exotic American. (I also imagined that La Vie en Rose would be playing on an accordion, because my understanding of European culture is still pretty amorphous). That didn’t happen, for a few reasons:

1. Internet access was intermittent and unpredictable. I could barely tweet. The hotels all promised “high-speed internet,” which is apparently defined differently outside the SF Bay Area; the places where I could get online at all still didn’t cooperate with Macs.
2. Sightseeing in Italy requires a lot of walking. At the end of the day, I didn’t want to get online; I just wanted to lie on the hotel bed and watch my feet and their red, cartoon-like throbbing. (There were even little stink lines coming off them, I swear to Jupiter).
3. For some reason, I never appreciated just how big a tourist attraction Italy is. Not only was I surrounded by hordes of American, French, German, Australian, Spanish, and Italian tourists the entire time I was there, but I got tons of recommendations before, during, and after the trip. There’s not really much I could add to the mountain of stuff that’s been written about the places, or to what people have already seen.
4. Not much interesting happened. This is not a bad thing. In fact, the total lack of adventure was exactly what I was hoping for.

Still, after two weeks traveling alone in a country where you don’t speak the language, you build up a pretty sizable transcript of internal monologue. Here’s the kind of stuff I would’ve commented on, in handy list format:

• Pretty much all of the major tourist attractions in Rome — except for the Vatican — are crammed into a surprisingly compact area. I’d be walking to find a bus stop, turn a corner, and Bam! there’s the Pantheon. Or the Roman Forum. Or the Trevi Fountain. The maps and the sightseeing bus make everything seem farther apart than it really is.
• Just because you can walk between sights, doesn’t mean you should. I imagine for the rest of my life, every time I see a column I’m going to get psychosomatic searing foot pain.
• Any benefit to all the walking I did was offset by my mistaken belief that you had to order two courses at every meal. I’m not sure which travel guide put the idea into my head, but I was convinced that waiters would have me ejected from the restaurant if I didn’t. So I spent the bulk of the trip bloated from unwanted veal.
• I’m not sure if it’s because my expectations had been set impossibly high, or if I just have terrible luck with restaurants, but I wasn’t impressed with the food. It ranged from “pretty good” to “meh” — nothing inedible, but nothing exceptional, either. I didn’t go anywhere too fancy (because I didn’t want to bother), but I stayed away from the tourist-heavy areas most of the time, and I took recommendations from travel books and from tour guides. Still, the best Italian food I’ve ever had has been in San Rafael and San Francisco.
• While I didn’t go anywhere that served absolutely awful food, I did get some absolutely awful service. A place in Venice (that was recommended by a travel book) was the worst: I’d thought that the service industry in San Francisco had made great strides in surliness and unfriendliness, but they’re strictly amateur class when compared to some of these Italian waiters. (And of course, several of the places had exceptionally friendly service, so it wasn’t everyone).
• I’m a total whore for those open-air sightseeing buses; I can’t get enough of them. I bought a two-day ticket for one line and rode the entire circuit at least three times. And then I paid for a different line for a third day. They’re slow and crowded, and the voiceover narration is never worth anything, but still: drop me in any city, and I’ll make a bee-line right for the open-air bus. I’ve even considered riding the ones in San Francisco, and the only reason I haven’t is because it’s too cold.
• The people everywhere I went had a better understanding of English than I do of Italian. So we’re making progress in our goal of bending the rest of the world to our culture! Now that we’ve got most of western Europe speaking English, we just need to work on getting them to form queues and respect personal space.
• I’ve had nightmares that were, quite literally, a direct replay of the taxi ride from my hotel in Rome to the airport. A few years ago, when I was in Paris, I watched the cars careening around the roundabouts and had my chuckling American “heh, how do those crazy Europeans manage?” moment. Watching — and being in — traffic in Rome was neither amusing nor fascinating; I don’t want to know how they do it, I just want to be promised that I never ever have to get in a car in Rome again.

That plus my pictures from around the city are all I’ve got to say about Rome for now. I’ve got more photos on the way of the Colosseum, Forum, Pantheon, and Vatican Museum, and the other cities I went to on the trip. (The best pictures came out of Florence and Siena). I’ll put them up when I can get everything organized and remember what happened when and where. Stay tuned!

It’s still a week away, but I’m already trying to get myself in the right mindset for my upcoming vacation. It’s a somewhat spontaneous trip to Rome, Florence, and Venice, prompted mostly by watching the last season of the HBO series in a two-week burst and then getting an e-mail reminding me my frequent flier miles were about to expire.

I say “somewhat spontaneous” because I made the reservations well over a month ago. But that’s spontaneous for me, because I’ve got the kind of overwhelming inertia that makes me have to fill out a list of pros and cons before I’ll leave the house even for groceries. I get… nervous when I’m separated from my computer and refrigerator for too long. The movie Into the Wild, about a guy who abandons all his possessions and hitchhikes through Alaska, is incorrectly labeled as “Adventure” and “Biography”. I call it “horror.”

But that’s negative thinking! This is going to be an adventure-filled trip to the birthplace of civilization. It’ll be great to get away from San Francisco, and visit a place with fascinating history, great food, interesting architecture, and a beautiful rolling countryside filled with vineyards.

That’s the other problem: it’s kind of hard to get all that excited about sightseeing when you start every day by driving over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. There are plenty of things not to like about San Francisco, but “lack of scenery” isn’t one of them.

I’ve tried to get myself in the mood by watching La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday and of course, Gomorra, but as soon as the camera stops showing the Coliseum or the Forum or gondolas or dudes wrestling in togas, my attention starts to drift elsewhere. I’m not even a little bit Italian, and I don’t drink wine or coffee, so there’s little pulling me there.

Of course, I’m not at all Japanese, and I’m not crazy about seafood, so there’s little pulling me to Japan either. The difference there: the place really does feel like you’re about to see a samurai or a giant robot (or both!) at any moment. The part of me that would rather stay in bed keeps telling me that Italy is just foreign enough to be inconvenient, but not foreign enough to feel like an adventure.

So my current plan is just to chill the hell out. I’m not going to think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime expedition to a land rich in history, but a vacation. I’m not going to make a list of 100 things I have to see in each location, but wander around and take pictures. If I feel like heading back to the hotel room and watching TV or just lying down, so what? I’m not getting graded on this trip, and if I miss anything important, that’s what the Travel Channel is for. I’ll just take advantage of two weeks of not doing anything of consequence, and more important: not feeling like I should be doing anything of consequence.

And testing my theory about how much prosciutto a human being can eat before his heart explodes. And chasing it with tiramisu.