Gracie mille for all your thoughts and comments on this, it's been a blast. Ciao! 👋🇮🇹🍝🍕

apparent foolishness. Growing up in the West, which has been marinated in this for centuries, it's hard to get how subversive this was. And yet it transformed the whole course of human history.

COUNTER-CULTURE Better understanding the context in which Jesus &his early followers lived has only heightened my appreciation for how utterly counter-cultural &beautiful he is. In cultures obsessed w/ power&wisdom, the Cross demonstrates God's strength in weakness&the wisdom of

BUILDINGS Are always talking to us. I've just not been a great listener to date.

UNDER THE SUN The hunger for power&glory. Acts of great heroism. Obsession w/reputation&legacy. Ability to create breath-taking art. Abuse of people&nature for self-serving means. Every era of history of full of such contradictions. Life is best enjoyed w/ a teaspoon of nuance.

There's all sorts of assumptions when we start sentences with "You'd think that in 2021..." / "Speaking as modern people..." - I just wonder whether we need a bit more humility when exploring the complexity of the past, which - don't forget - is what we'll be before long...

HUMBLE I'm convinced that we've hugely guilty of 'chronological snobbery'. Whilst we're undoubtedly more developed than ever in terms of medical and technological developments, I'm just not convinced of it in terms of character formation.

INTERCONNECTED Exploring this era of history has confirmed we're way more interconnected than we imagine, along both the 'history' and 'geography' axes. "What have the Romans ever done for us" et cetera

EXPERTS I've been so grateful to sage guides in the form of @GetReadyForRome, @holland_tom & Mary Beard, whose passion, eloquence and insight have been a real gift.

A proportion of the 1000s of hours I've given to @WestHam might have been better invested on the Ancients, who I'm realising are endlessly fascinating. Hopefully the start of something...

25| Arrivederci! Like the great empire itself, the sun sets on these Riflessioni di Roma. A few concluding thoughts: CATCH-UP I had a primary school level knowledge of the Ancient Romans&hadn't properly thought about them since watching Gladiators aged 11.

So Latin is dead (no more native speakers) but not extinct (no speakers at all). It's as if Latin is a linguistic metaphor for Ancient Rome itself - no longer existing in its original form, but with a foundational influence which endures - often imperceptibly.

there was no unifying influence. So language did what language does - evolve. First into Vulgar (#$%!) Latin and then into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. As the rest of the Empire died, Latin went with it.

24| Dead but not Extinct Latin spread along w/ the Empire. It became (&remains) the international tongue of literature, philosophy, theology&law. But given its reach, how did it die out? & why so quickly? W/ the fall of the Western part of the Empire,

🤫 "There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile." The dream had died. #Istanbulievable #vandals #Rome #paxromana #caesarsalad

💰 VANDALS: the Eternal City raided in 455 by the sumptuously-named Vandals. Game over in 476 - the Western part of the Empire is no more. It takes another thousand years for the Eastern part to get the Game Over treatment.

🦃 EAST: 306AD Constantine the Great becomes the first emperor to legalize Christianity, and establishes Constantinopolis (modern-day Istanbul) as the new capital of the eastern empire, recognising the eastward shift in power away from Rome.

✌️ PAX ROMANA: 200 years of Emperors, w/ brutally-enforced peace, uprisings are given short shrift. 📉 RUST: 180AD Commodus takes over, marking the beginning of the end - "from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron".

🥗 CAESARS: 44BC Julius Caesar has a brief stint as dictator. Swiftly assassinated, on a site which is now a public cattery (see pic). JC's adopted son Octavian defeats his bro Mark Anthony, becomes Caesar Augustus ("the venerated"). Loved by the people for bringing peace&order.

expands beyond what we think of as Italy today. 🪖 EMPIRE: It then transitions to an Empire, ruled by military commanders - w/ plenty of civil war, roughin&stuffin'.