Week Four - Original Prompt

Owen sleeps in a mound of blankets between our feet. Henry sleeps in my arms. All the way across the Atlantic, there is turbulence; bulkheads shake, glasses tinkle, galley latches open and close. We are moving from Boise, Idaho, to Rome, Italy, a place I've never been. When I think of Italy, I imagine decadence, dark brown oil paintings, emperors in sandals. I see a cross-section of a school-project Colosseum, fashioned from glue and sugar cubes; I see a navy-blue-and-white soap dish, bought in Florence, chipped on one corner, that my mother kept beside her bathroom sink for thirty years. More clearly than anything else, I see a coloring book I once got for Christmas entitled Ancient Rome. Two babies slurped milk from the udders of a wolf. A Caesar grinned in his leafy crown. A slinky, big-pupiled maiden posed with a jug beside a fountain. Whatever Rome was to me then -- seven years old, Christmas night, snowflakes dashing against the windows, a lighted spruce blinking on and off downstairs, crayons strewn across the carpet -- it's hardly clearer now: outlines of elephants and gladiators, cartoonish palaces in the backgrounds, a sense that I had chosen all the wrong colors, aquamarine for chariots, goldenrod for skies. On the television screen planted in the seat-back in front of me, our little airplane icon streaks past Marseilles, Nice. A bottle of baby formula, lying sideways in the seat pocket, soaks through the fabric and drips onto my carry-on, but I don't reach down to straighten it for fear I will wake Henry. -- Anthony Doerr. Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World 

I'm all about juxtaposition and this "there's two sides of Rome" idea we have been playing with for the last month. I think this Anthony Doerr exemplifies the concept in a new way brilliantly and offer that as my prompt for this week. I love the way he weaves the old and the new together--not the excepted old and new, with cars zipping past monuments, for example. Rather, it is his own old and new: the newness of being a new father with this new experience of traveling and traveling with twins and moving to a new location, alongside all of the preconceptions he has had about Rome/Italy. Those, too, I think we could draw upon: he does not offer one single pre-image of Italy but instead a series of preconceptions, from emperors to coloring books. Prompt: Juxtapose a uniquely adult experience within/about Italy with a series of childhood/younger-self ideas and images about/of Italy.