Crafting a permanent memento of imperfect grandeur to remember Rome by.
Rome has no geographic grid. Other cities like Washington, D.C., or Chicago were planned, their streets stretching in an orderly pattern that I find more easily navigable. The Italian capital wasn’t a planned city, its cobblestones creating a web that stretches from St. Peter’s Basilica across the Tiber River to the Colosseum. The streets coalesce to form the Eternal City.
I spent the spring 2024 semester in Rome and traveled throughout Europe. Ten cities hit, six classes completed, numerous sites toured and countless photos left me completely drained. I counted down to my flight home with anticipation. On May 4, I sat down in a lounge in Fiumicino Airport exhausted. The day I had been waiting for had finally arrived: departure.
My flight didn’t take off for a few hours, but I had split an Uber with some other Domers. Double fisting prosecco and a cappuccino with breakfast, I couldn’t do anything else but sit with my headphones on and listen to music after I ate. My mind was still too cluttered to make sense of the whole semester. No one back home was awake yet to talk with. I had already finished the day’s New York Times games. So, I just sat. After months of flying, driving, planning and walking, I finally just sat.
Studying abroad challenged me in ways that I didn’t expect. I thought I was pretty good at being alone: I’m an only child and I’ve lived by myself during summer internships. I often seem to be running through my busy schedule at school mostly alone. But in Rome, I have never been so lonely.
I didn’t really prepare for Rome. Originally, I was supposed to spend the semester at Notre Dame Jerusalem, but after the Hamas invasion of Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, I chose Rome from a short list of options — a very worthy second choice. I quickly changed programs, applied for visas, bought flights and before I knew it, I was landing in Italy. But I don’t speak Italian, am not of Italian descent and knew nothing about Italian history. Without room left for me in the University’s villa, they found me a twin bed in a seven-person basement apartment with other visiting students mostly not from Notre Dame.
At first, I was OK living in the unfamiliar. The first grocery store trip took me an hour. The first pharmacy visit was confusing. Every time I left my apartment, it required so much thinking to get through. It wasn’t “survival,” so to speak, life wasn’t that serious. And eventually, I got quicker in completing things and learned a little Italian. My grocery store visits went fast as I became more familiar with the store. But living uncomforted for months — in a strange city, without my friends and family, fumbling with a language I don’t speak — wore me out.
By the time I left, I was physically and mentally exhausted. Rome made me feel trapped. I had weekend retreats to other cities, but I couldn’t get out of the claustrophobic feeling. Stuck in my basement apartment with little natural light, the occasional rodent, and with human roommates I had just met, gave me a feeling of having no options or escape. When my family came to visit at the beginning of April, it was an exciting break to how I was feeling. We spent time touring the city and celebrated the wedding of my godmother, who was marrying an Italian and holding the ceremony in Rome. But once everyone left, I was the one that was stuck there. I couldn’t leave. The last month abroad felt like four.
I thought that Rome was supposed to be this beautiful, enthralling place with great wonders like the Colosseum, Pantheon and Vatican City. But as I stayed for months away from those I was closest to, encountering so many new cities in Europe, I began to wrestle with how much I wasn’t enjoying my time. There were incredible things but being pushed to my breaking point made me start to question what being lonely really looked like, and how strong I was as a person.
A favorite place of mine for thinking in Rome was the Basilica of San Clemente. The apse mosaic features Christ on a cross which vines grow from, encircling representations of humans’ daily life. Sitting in a pew, I mused in a journal:
What does He think?
When He looks down from apse mosaic or fresco,
Peering out from the old paint
Seeing a fallen, wayward son unable to breathe.
Do Him and Peter and laugh at the stakes?
Or turn to Paul and ask for his take?
He didn’t walk the roads I am but
He moves the chess pieces with nail-scarred hands.
Living abroad forced me to think. I’m not sure that I can measure up to my full potential. This was the greatest mental challenge — being forced out of my comfort zone and into the questions I had been running from. All the ones they say you confront when “seeing the world.” Who am I? What’s my place? What do I believe? What time is my flight? Which city are we going to this weekend?
You see, I’ve lived a wonderful, sheltered life, for the most part. I love my hometown, my family and the way I grew up. To be so far away from home and struggling so much with the big questions of life without the friends and family who brought me this far was pretty unbearable. I took it out on Rome, developing a disdain for the great city.
My penultimate weekend abroad, I went to Nice, France. I found a cheap flight, booked the ticket and an Airbnb quickly, and left. I wanted a weekend away from my Roman quarters to think, relax and put some time into my final papers I’d need to turn in when I went back. The first afternoon I ventured to a pub to watch AS Roma’s dull tie with Napoli. Sipping a dreadfully poured Guinness, I struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler from Canada. We talked about Europe, traveling and the life back home. I shared that while I had mostly enjoyed the time abroad, the difficulties of it all made me very anxious to get home. He reminded me something I didn’t consider before, “You won’t remember the bad moments eventually.”
He was right. The more the calendar has ticked away since I got back, I’m forgetting most of the moments I was scared or uncomfortable. The lessons have sunk in, and I’ll be scared and uncomfortable again in life. But the details of those specific moments when I was frustrated or upset are fading away.
My experiences across Spain, England, Belgium, Andorra, Switzerland, France, Malta and Italy, on the other hand, remain vivid in my mind. I’ve answered the “How was abroad?” question a hundred times now in the weeks I’ve been home. I often mention how ready I was to come back, but my family and friends want to hear the stories of adventure, and that’s what I want to tell. Because I met incredible new people and made new friends. I learned to snowboard in the mountains of Andorra, prepared fresh chocolates in Belgium, partied too hard at a club in Barcelona, made fun of the royals in front of Buckingham Palace, and visited the tomb of Saint Peter levels underneath the main basilica. (To name a few).
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses has been an inspiration for me during this time. It’s an imagined monologue of Odysseus’ as he returns home from his adventures. He believes that “I am a part of all that I have met” and ends with the encouragement to continue “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” If I throw in the towel too early, I’ll never meet fresh faces or have new experiences along the difficult adventures that are coming. I think about the man from Canada, the Chelsea Stadium tour guide, my Roman history professor and countless others I interacted with that left pieces of themselves in me. I think about the adventures I had amid the mental challenge.
Maybe I owe an apology to the city of Rome. Perhaps its only fault was that it happened to be the setting where the struggle with life’s big questions hit me the hardest. Perhaps I would’ve felt the same way if I had gone to Jerusalem and dealt with the same big questions that come out of uncomfortable situations. Perhaps the great men Rome developed before I got there dealt with the same questions.
In my last week, I added a tattoo on my leg at a shop in Trastevere. It is a Doric column with a Latin inscription across the bottom that translates to “10 cities, Spring 2024.” But my favorite part that the artist and I settled on was to make the column look a bit crumbled.
It’s not perfect, and neither was my experience abroad.
Sam Coffman, a rising senior American studies major and journalism minor, is this magazine’s summer intern.