Settimana Una - Una Memoria

          Sweating and small in our tourism, we searched for Corso Street. For the square cobbled between three roads, for the stop that left us, we hoped, beside the fountain. A man aproned behind a gelato counter pointed out of the window, down a side street, to accented signs and plaques decorating alleyways, and the one bus driver aware of the words do you go here, who might understand my pointed finger and my aunt’s labored shoulders. Pressed on all sides by an age-stained bench and a German family, we missed the view: the purpled fingers of a vendor lifting Nike statues for fifteen euro, the school children crouched at the sidewalk smearing chalk, the steepled left behinds of a victorious battle. We searched for her grace again, for a translation of breath. We hid from edge of a year she’d soon fall off. Five years later, I’m here again, standing before greatness--or what my art history textbooks and the tour guide’s belted speaker explain to me is greatness. On my left, the Colosseum, its speckled skin spinning a lush thread work of decaying history into the air, or something like that. To my right, a field of shot glasses, miniature Pietà statues, and color block t-shirts on folding tables.