[StainlessDeal]

Rome.

The best food I've ever eaten was in Rome.

Just to wake up and see the sun rising over buildings renowned the world over, to cool my feet in the fountain below the Spanish Steps, to listen to the ages echo against the tombs of Popes gone a thousand years in the catacombs beneath St, Peter's, to feel the weight of the faith of millions lying on the stone floor before the High Altar...this is food for the eternal part of us.

Even to a non-Catholic such as myself, the contact with the ageless is mind-bending. For more than 2500 years the civilised world has looked to Rome as its mother. Few characters that have influenced the course of history have not at least had deputies walk the streets of this ancient seat of empire and faith.

None of us lives without the mark the people of this city stamped on our languages, customs, religions, and philosophies. What's more, the very buildings and fortresses, parks and monuments frequented by those forgers of the unified Western expression of culture, polity, and reason are still there, many performing exactly the functions for which their foundations were laid.

This city was ancient when Michealangelo carved and painted the finest art worked by human hands half a millenium ago, and the art that influenced him as a young man was still on public display in the streets then, as it is now, and as some of those pieces have been since hundreds of years before Jesus walked the Earth.

I remember the moment when I was listening to a guide describing the memorial speech Marc Antony gave in Ceaser's honor and to shame his assassins, and the guide pointed right at me as I leaned against a wall.

"Marc Antony stood upon the Rostrum behind me, and Ceasar's corpse was burned right there." I was standing on the spot where Julius Caesar was burned after he had changed the course of history by making the Empire a Dictatorship rather than a Democracy. What's more, the English word dictator comes from the Latin word of the same meaning, a word that was an obscure legal title in his day, has become a commonplace term in our world, precisely because of this one man's actions.

I ate a Gelato standing opposite the Milvian Bridge, the place where in 312, Constantine's legionaires defeated the pretender to the Roman throne as the result of divine intervention. This allowed him to enter Rome on the Flaminian way (a road already over a thousand years old) and inspiring Constantine to credit the Christian God with his victory.

This was the beginning of Christianity's ascendance in Europe, this was the site where the Empire became a Christian entity, and the place where the doom of polytheistic western thought was writ large upon history...and there I was eating an extraordinary chocolate ice, as people that lived and worked nearby went about their daily activities with hardly a thought.

I love Rome because almost every square foot is historically significant to more than half the world's poulation. Having been there, I realize how impoverished my life would have been, had I never seen the Eternal City.

I'd go back at the drop of a hat, any day or season, without a second thought.