All of Rome belongs to you.

You can look out over the skyline and mark every place that you own. Every dome of every church that belongs unreservedly to you. Each famous point of reference with which you share the perfect affinity of witness, contemplation, and creation. Places you have created for yourself--not the landmark, but rather just the right opinion on it. A few descriptive phrases, wrestled by your brain to perfection, jealously guarded inside your mind.

You own every single spot you have visited, every marvel of Rome to which you have paid awed or indifferent homage. From the twin domes at the triumvirate end of Piazza del Popolo to the twin spires of Trinita` dei Monti crowning the Spanish Steps. Even the white, puffy scar of the Vittorio Emanuele monument. The beautiful and the ugly, beloved and detested. Dirty, sunken ruins and shiny, belching traffic.

But you also own the Via Appia Antica that shoots, arrow-straight, a ROMAN road, south out of the city, past generations of pious Christians whose greatest sin in the eyes of their world was to exist. They have had their revenge, made your city their capital, and spent centuries sprinkling your Rome with temples where people can worship their frescoes and confetti-marbled floors. Deep green, burgundy, old white, with gray mortar.

You possess the pale curve of the Colosseum that peeks out, thin, delicate and proud, you catch it with your eye, the owner's eye. You know how to pick its broken marble shell out of the complex sprawl and introverted jumble of your city.

You reign over the wide, noble hemisphere of the Pantheon, worshipped by its many gods, perfect in their architecture, symmetry, and devotion to the human race.

You also own the diminutive dome of Santa Maria Del Popolo, distinguishable only to your trained gaze, a treasure of art and dignity. Caravaggio and Rafaello, Pinturicchio and Bramante all find peace inside, their artistic legacies resting together in this mildly touristed spot at the edge of your city's walls.

Yours alone are the myriad medieval buildings of the Jewish Ghetto, of Trastevere. You own every convoluted alleyway that carves its worn worm path through the exquisitely special mundanity of a settling, dusty Metropolis. You lay claim to each and every unidentifiable dome that punctuates the panoramic spill, simply because it exists and rises above the five story skyscrapers of your Rome. These churches thrust their perfect and perfunctory hemispheres above the sprawl, all for you. They do it for you.

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