Italy mixes the new with the old

Eating pizza in Italy can be distracting. I had my face transfixed upon my giant plate, determined to do nothing else until I had finished every bite. That’s when I looked up from our table outside the Roman restaurant and was reminded that the Colosseum was literally right across the street, looming over the horizon.

It’s easy to take something like that for granted when everything else around an ancient stadium looks brand new and modern. That’s what really struck me about the cities I visited — Florence, Rome and Venice. There could be a thousand-year-old building with a McDonald’s for a neighbor and a giant poster for “The A-Team” on a wall next to it. Yet none of this took away from the grandeur and sheer awesomeness of these landmarks. In fact, they added to them. Seeing something that has stood the test of time while everything around it has been built, torn down, rebuilt, torn down and so on, is amazing in itself. Pop culture simply exists around these monuments, and the buildings just sit there unchanging like a stubborn old man.

Rome was the best example of this. Venice, on the other hand, tends to just look old no matter what is put in it. The boats are all modern, and there are advertisements in as many places as anywhere else, but there’s just something about canals for streets that force it to retain its charm. It’s so easy to imagine what it looked like two hundred years ago even if little looks the same.

A little off subject, but I feel the need to get this off my chest. I’m still in Europe right now, so I’m not up-to-date on the current hit songs in the US, but in every country I’ve been to, I’ve heard an Italian techno song that is nothing short of the greatest dance song ever constructed. What sounds like the words “Pa Pa Americano” are repeated over this twenty-minute-long up-tempo club beat. If I take just one thing away from my trip to Europe, I would want it to be that modern musical masterpiece.

But I digress. I mentioned those “A-Team” posters earlier. They are advertising the hell out of that movie over here. Everywhere I go, I can’t turn 360 degrees without seeing a giant poster of Bradley Cooper with that stupid smile of his. (Sorry. I don’t like Bradley Cooper). In London, I saw dozens of people walking around Piccadilly Circus with a poster in their hand. Apparently, they were just being handed out for free to anybody who wanted one.

There are really only tiny details about pop culture in Italy that are different from back home and the rest of Europe for that matter. You walk around and know that things are different, but you have trouble putting your finger on what it is exactly. Where I believe the real difference lies is just how much older everything is while it still looks new.
To put it maybe more intelligently, it is the country’s seamless juxtaposition of its ancient history with modernity.