Rome

You can call yourself The Eternal City when the shadows of your history include Titian, Caravaggio and Michelangelo; when your urban population was a million people a thousand years before those talents built the European Renaissance and when your emperors ruled the known world five hundred years before that. History is everywhere; you can find evidence of it on any street corner. Five hundred years of Roman ruins sit quietly beside medieval churches and Renaissance monuments. But it doesn’t end there. The Monument of Victor Emmanuel was built in the late 19^th century. The Altare della Patria (Altar of the Nation) as it is called (among other things, including The Wedding Cake) dominates one of the many Roman skylines. It’s only 17 centuries and a 10 minute walk from the Flavian Amphitheatre, universally known as The Colosseum – and when you call it that, nobody asks you which one. Across the Tiber, Vatican City has been the centre of one of the world’s major religions for more than a millennium. St. Peter’s is the largest Catholic Church in the world, and the Vatican museum system holds the treasures of its history. The collection is so vast no single person can possibly see it all.

Romans are proud of their history and there is a lot of it to see — but one stroll down Via Veneto shows you where the 21^st century lives. Not five minutes from the Trevi Fountain, built in 1762, you can find the latest female fashions walking smartly along the street. So today I’m going to relax, order a cappuccino and remember Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Dublin

Dublin is one of the coolest “little” cities in the world. People call it little because you can get anywhere in 20 minutes or less and everybody seems to know everybody else; either that or they’re related. It doesn’t matter what the tour books say; the centre of town is the Post Office. It was the site of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and if you look closely you can still see the bullet holes.

In a land of poets and storytellers, Dublin writers have received four Nobel Prizes in Literature: more than any other city in the world. They are, in no particular order, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Plus, Shaw has the distinction of winning both the Nobel Prize and an Oscar. He’s the only person to ever do that on his own merit.

Dublin is also home to Guinness, the only chewable beverage on the planet. The founder, Arthur Guinness, was so sure that people would like his brew that, in 1759, he took out a 9,000 year lease on the brewery property. Today, Guinness Brewery pays about $60.00 a year rent. That might have been big money in the 18^th century but wouldn’t host a good size drunk these days.

In Dublin, you can find St Valentine (his remains are at Whitefriar Street Church) the only bridge in Europe that is wider than it’s long (O’Connell Bridge) and more Stag and Hen parties than anywhere else on the planet. Welcome to Temple Bar. Here are a few of my new friends. Let’s get this party started.

Cuba

If you want to go to Cuba, you better go very soon. One of these days the United States will lift the embargo and the last fifty years of Cuban history will vanish. Jay Leno and ten thousand other guys just like him will swoop down on that little island like the Assyrians of old. They’ll be hauling bushel baskets of Benjamin Franklins with them and offering them up for everything from cars to baseball cards. Fidel’s Revolution simply won’t be able to survive the tsunami of cash. This is no sin by the way, it’s just a fact. History has a way of changing its attire to suit the occasion. Castro and his crew knew this as far back as 1959 and sloganed it appropriately with Hasta Siempre.
All photographs by Carolyn Bourcier.