It seems impossible that it has been a month since I left the Centro. I had two wonderful weeks in Italy with my family afterwards (pictures pending if I ever get my act together), but it has been four weeks since the semester ended and everyone I met this fall returned home. I’m back at Duke now, settled on Central Campus and somehow already playing catch-up on readings, but so it goes. C’è la vita. I couldn’t be more excited to be back at this school, but after running into yet another vague acquaintance on the quad, I have been thinking a lot about how to describe Rome to others. And I’ve realized that I cannot separate the city of Rome and my months living there from the people with whom I lived (and studied and ate and danced and cried and drank, etc.). It all comes down to this.
I spent a lot of last semester singing. I am not a singer, most of my friends are not singers, but for four blissful months we were singing and humming and stumbling our way throughout Rome. Our study abroad program by nature had a decent amount of time where we were just standing in line or travelling to site or frolicking around some ancient town, and in these moments it was inevitable for someone to start singing something– it never took long for the other five of us to join in. We sang “Let It Snow” in Latin (it’s Ningiat, a 3rd-person singular present active subjunctive if you’re curious). We bopped to Taylor Swift during every bus ride, gelato run, and illicit pregame. At our favorite bar we requested all the songs we also requested at 7th grade dances (can I get some B.o.B and Jason Derulo in here please?). I’m sure the ancient Roman ghosts at the Pantheon or Pompeii were just as horrified as our classmates by our bizzare sing-along mix of Mamma Mia, Hamilton, A Star Is Born, Moulin Rouge, Rent, The Greatest Showman, Wicked, and Les Mis. The only movies we watched together were musicals; we created Facebook events in our group chat just to organize post-dinner dance sessions; on our last day we held hands and wept together seeing Bohemian Rhapsody in a tiny Trastevere theater.
And obviously I know that music is not a thing that is exclusive to me and my friends. A million people have had a million different memories and connections to a million different songs. The way we scream-yelled “You Belong With Me,” as beautiful a rendition as that is, is different from how I scream-yell “Love On Top” with my Duke friends. The way my parents heard and remember Queen is different from how I do, listening to “Don’t Stop Me Know” for the 7th time of the day. The way we ran through the entire opening song of Beauty and the Beast from memory at the famous Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum (what a poor provincial life) is different from how every person who lived in that 2,000-year-old villa experienced their own songs and poems. As much as we sang our way through the semester, I obviously understand that a love of music is not something that was unique to my group of friends.
But the thing with music is that it makes you feel like it does belong to you, and only to you. In the brief minutes when we were possessed by the spirit of Taylor Swift or performing our poor choreography for “Thank U, Next,” the song felt more ours than anyone else’s. In that moment, we were the only people in the world, the only ones having that experience with that piece of music. We so easily got lost in the foolish joy of singing together that it truly seemed infinite, as if our messy sing-alongs were as timeless and important as the words of Homer or the legacy of Alexander Hamilton.
A thousand students studied abroad this fall and had a thousand different experiences, each exquisite, each unique, each valid. Mine is not really that different from any of theirs– we all went places, made friends, missed Duke, survived exams, cried on the last day. But like a run-through of “Dancing Queen” at the Vatican Museums or “One Day More” while schlepping to the Colosseum, it felt like it was uniquely ours, uniquely limitless. This semester, with these beautiful people, was never going to end. We were just going to swing right into the next verse, the next album, the next jukebox-musical hit without missing a beat, lost in the absurdity and hilarity and sheer elation of being together with people who shared the same horrible (/amazing??) taste in music.
But it did end. A month ago today I waved goodbye as a taxi carried us all in separate directions and I don’t know the next time we’ll all be together, all listening to the same music. We have aggressively sung our way all over the cobblestones of the Eternal City, up and down the Italian peninsula, and now, armed with a whole suite of Spotify playlists, back to our own schools. But in addition to our postcards and Instagram posts we also have dozens of songs that will be forever marked by this beautiful semester. As if woven by Penelope, every chorus we belted out is intricately braided with our memories of who we were with; which of the Imperial Fora we saw that day; what kind of pasta we ate for dinner; which Petronius passage we had to translate in class; how bad the wine was that night. My Spotify is a time capsule for the soul-changing, life-giving friendships and memories from this semester in Rome. So in the wise and ever-applicable words of ABBA/Amanda Seyfried, I would like to say Thank You for the Music, and the best semester of my life, and the memories that will travel far beyond the Aurelian Walls. My sweet friends, I have been so blessed with knowing you, and I cannot wait to see where on the wine-dark sea Life takes you. Ciao for now, miei tesori.
Wright Now 