I walk along Via dei Fori Imperiali: as I move towards the Colosseum, the walk becomes a journey across the centuries, and my gaze opens onto the marvels that man, yesterday as today, knows how to accomplish — in art as in engineering. I find myself thinking of how many lives have measured these same spaces and thought these same thoughts, over more than two thousand years. It is not nostalgia. For a moment, these stones do not separate those who have been from those who will be: they hold them together.
I stop in front of the recently inaugurated metro station, which cost years, money and controversy. And instead of the irritation one might expect, I feel wonder.
Because here they did not simply dig a hole to run a train through. Going down the stairs, you do not change level: you change era. The walls are stratigraphy, the underground a book read backwards; to reach the present, you must first travel through time. It is the opposite of how most of the world builds: elsewhere they demolish, or they tear the artefact away and lock it in a distant museum. Not here. Here the ancient is left where it was born, and space is made around it.
At the entrance, before the turnstiles, a great marble head welcomes those who enter. It is a Medusa, and her gaze once had a task: to protect. Two thousand years ago she watched over those who climbed to the Temple of Venus and Roma — the largest temple of ancient Rome — which stood exactly up there, above my head. Today she watches over those who descend into the metro, in the very same spot, only further down. Same function, same threshold, time turned upside down. Resurfacing from the collapse layers just as the line was being dug, she has returned to doing what she was carved for: standing on the threshold, watching those who cross it.
None of this was easy. To keep millennia-old monuments from collapsing, they froze the ground, raised retaining walls, turned industrial excavation into archaeological digging done by hand, layer after layer; and every new find forced schedules and plans to be redrawn. Not the fastest way. Not the cheapest. The most respectful. The constraint — you cannot destroy — became a method, and from the limit a form was born. And yet this is precisely what we fail to celebrate enough.
And there is something greater in this slowness that costs effort, time and money. Building slowly, building with respect, means building for a time we will not see: preserving the work so that it reaches, intact, those who come after us. It is exactly what our forebears did. They did not protect this beauty for themselves: they handed it down through the centuries so that today it would be ours. We are merely the temporary custodians of a gift received, and our task is simply to carry it further on. Haste consumes; patience inherits, and leaves an inheritance.
I already know that some, instead of wonder, will choose to see only the drip — that little water that came down from the ceiling in the first days. I write this to defuse the controversy, not to feed it: it would be yet another time we stop at the drop and miss the cathedral.
It is precisely in this constant tension — where our native inclination to complain coexists with an absolute mastery of making — that Italy and its people are mirrored, bound by a line of blood and ingenuity that runs straight back to those who came before us. We carry within us the same geometric rigour as our fathers, a deep root that withstands even our everyday flaws. Instead of letting ourselves be distracted by the echo of controversy, we should rediscover the exact measure of our worth and give wonder back its space: recognising ourselves as heirs to a patient audacity, still capable of raising cathedrals and ferrying them beyond our present.