"The Physics of the Quest"

"Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning." - Giotto di Bondone

I've thought a lot about God lately. Maybe it's the forests of gilded cathedrals everywhere, or the miracle of the Sistine Chapel or the devotion so prevalent here that every waitress seems to have a Virgin Mary medallion slung around her neck. I think more likely though it is the way that, no matter what I do, things keep transpiring to keep me safe and happy and healthy. Because I couldn't find a cell signal (though certainly not for lack of trying), I was forced to stay in this beautiful and chaotic centre of Rome for the last week, and it has been one of the best experiences of my life. Because a waiter sat me close to a certain couple from Cleveland at a white-table-cloth restaurant by the Pantheon, I had one of the most uplifting encounters I will perhaps ever have.

I had breakfast at a historic cafe in Piazza Sant'Eustachio for the second time this morning. If you google Piazza Sant'Eustachio, just about every hit you bring up will be a publication of Sant'Eustachio Il Caffe, which was exactly what I was looking for when I followed my map to the secluded via behind the Pantheon for the first time. Famed for its superior grounds and lighter-than-air millefoglie, the coffee shop was founded in the thirties and draws hoards of tourists to its doors everyday, which don't open until 8:30AM, where most Italian coffee bars open much earlier. So you can understand my confusion when I arrived in the Piazza at 8:25 and walked into a neighbouring coffee shop with almost the same name, having no idea that it was not Sant'Eustachio Il Caffe. When I realized my mistake, I of course vowed to return the next morning to the right cafe. When I did, though, although the coffee was good and the millefoglie was every bit as rich and flaky as promised, I found it didn't live up to the rum baba (moist and tender sponge cake filled with whipped cream) and cappuccino I'd had the day before.

Having breakfast at the equally - if not more - historic nearby establishment today, sipping a great latte macchiato at the bar with a few locals and watching tourists form a line outside Sant'Eustachio Il Caffe before it was even open, I couldn't help but marvel at how the wrong cafe had really been the right one.

And yesterday I had walked until my legs felt like they were going to fall off, down Via Arenula, across Ponte Garibaldi over the Tiber all the way to the Trastevere district, looking for the trattoria where Anthony Bourdain had had cacio e pepe for the first time. It was an iconic scene on No Reservations in which the pasta (homemade of course) had arrived in an elegant little bowl made out of melted and cooled Parmesan cheese, next to a ceramic jug of red wine and a rustic bread basket on a blue-checkered tablecloth. Seeing it may have been what first sparked my love affair with Rome, and definitely my decision to eat cacio e pepe as much as possible while I was here.

I felt a swell of pride when I finally found the place, a modestly-sized corner trattoria tucked away in a side-street piazza. No Reservations hadn't even publicized the name in an attempt to spare the local gem from an onslaught of foodie travel-channel junkies (like myself), but I'd found it!

"Solo io," I told the waiter, red-faced and puffing from the walk over. Only me. The trattoria was full, but they had to have room for just one. Just one for a petite nest of cacio e pepe. No, he said, if I hadn't booked ahead, I hadn't a hope of eating here today. Ironic, I thought, considering I'd learned about the place on a show called No Reservations.

I was eating consolation cacio e pepe in a nice enough restaurant in Campo De Fiori called La Carbonara, looking out the window from my second-floor table at the flower-flooded piazza, and thinking again about Naples. I was only in Rome for a couple more days, and I was running out of chances to go. At the Airbnb meet-and-greet the week before, one of the local hosts I'd spoken to had told me not to bother with Naples if I was only going for the pizza. "Naples has some things to offer," she'd said, "but the pizza, we have the same thing here." Given my experience my first night out with Marcello, I suspected she was right. And yet I was still determined to go. Why? Just because Liz Gilbert had?

I'd walked halfway across Rome to have lunch at a specific trattoria, no more or less special than many other places in the city, just because Anthony Bourdain had. I'd already had extraordinary cacio e pepe multiple times since I got here, and yet had gone on this pilgrimage simply for the sake of following in the footsteps of one of my idols. As I drained the last drop of wine from my glass at La Carbonara, it suddenly occurred to me how incredibly stupid this was. It was no way to have an adventure, that much was for certain. This was not Tony Bourdain's trip, after all, or Liz Gilbert's. It was mine. As grateful to them as I was for providing the inspiration, the magic of travel, of exploring the world, was in making it your own. My heroes wouldn't want me simply to try and do what they did. That's not why they did it. And to cheapen my own growth by following the road already travelled by would be a dishonour to the gift they were trying to bring to the world. I liked the mantra from the Ellen Page movie Whip It: "Be your own hero."

In Eat Pray Love, Liz Gilbert talks about "the physics of the quest": "a force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity. The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared most of all to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you".

And the truth that was becoming ever clearer to me was this: whether or not you believe in God as some great, intelligent force working as the puppeteer behind all that happened on Earth, something - the Universe, Destiny, the laws of physics, just something - wanted me to go on this quest, to have a good experience. And whatever It was was making sure that I did.

This morning I was eating a porchetta sandwich - the best yet - in Piazza del Popolo, keeping the stone angels company and sharing my extra bread with the pigeons when it occurred to me that I might be spending too much time alone. Marcello had gone home to Sardinia, and I felt I'd already overstayed Cristina's generosity. It looked like my final days here would be peaceful, lonely, reflective ones. Maybe this wasn't a bad thing. It gave me time I needed to think, to extract every last drop of wisdom this Eternal City had to offer before I had to leave it.

In midday I took a walk back to Old Rome and the Coliseum, just because I could. The sky was the bluest, and the sun the strongest it had been yet. I listened to my iPod to drown out the sirens and motorcycles, and considered the sheer wonders I was passing, determined not to take them for granted no matter how many times I'd seen them. Things like this just didn't exist in North America. We were too young. I was too young. I thought about the things I was seeing and about the things I was going to see. It occurred to me that I would be moving back in time on this trip. Before Rome, after all, there was Greece. And Machu Picchu was staggeringly older still. Rome was the kid brother of the bunch. The beginning of the journey back. In the meantime I would be taking massive leaps forward in my own maturation. Maybe somewhere we would meet in the middle.

Deciding to rest my feet in the shade for a moment, I sat on a stone block that seemed older than time and stared at the towering wall of the Coliseum twenty feet in front of me. The present and the future grow up around the past. Like green, living climbing vines, modern Rome needs the stone foundation of the ancient world to survive. Maybe I do, too.