Tim and Paul Mattingly
at the Colosseum in Rome, Italy.

Eating pizza in Italy can be distracting. I had my face transfixed upon my giant plate, determined to do nothing else until I had finished every bite. That's when I looked up from our table outside the Roman restaurant and was reminded that the Colosseum was literally right across the street, looming over the horizon.

It's easy to take something like that for granted when everything else around an ancient stadium looks brand new and modern. That's what really struck me about the cities I visited (Florence, Rome, Venice). There could be a thousand year old building with McDonald's for a neighbor and a giant “A-Team” movie poster on a wall next to it. Yet, none of this took away from the grandeur and sheer awesomeness of these landmarks. In fact, they added to them. Seeing something that has stood the test of time while everything around it has been built, torn down, rebuilt, torn down, rebuilt, and so on, is amazing in itself. Pop culture simply exists around these artifacts and the buildings just sit there unchanging like some stubborn old man.

Rome was the best example of this. Venice, on the other hand, tends to just look old no matter what is put in it. The boats are all modern and there are advertisements in as many places as anywhere else, but there's just something about canals for streets that force it to retain its charm. It's so easy to imagine what it looked like 200 years ago even if little may look the same.

A little off subject, but I feel the need to get this off my chest., In every single country I went to I heard this Italian techno song that is nothing short of the greatest dance song ever constructed. The lyrics are in Italian but he says something that sounds like “Pa Pa Americano” over this twenty-minute long up-tempo club beat. If I take just one thing away from my trip to Europe, I would want it to be that modern musical masterpiece.

But I digress. I mentioned those “A-Team” posters earlier. They are advertising the heck out of that movie across the pond. I couldn't turn 360 degrees without seeing a giant poster of Bradley Cooper with that stupid smile of his (Sorry. I don't like Bradley Cooper). In London, I saw dozens of people walking around Picadilly Circus with a poster in their hand. Apparently, they were just being handed out for free to anybody who wanted one.

There are really only tiny details like that which are different about pop culture in Italy, and Europe for that matter. You walk around and know that things are different, but you have trouble putting your finger on what it is exactly. Where I believe the real difference lies is just how much older everything is and yet everything still looks new. To maybe put it more intelligently, it is the country's seamless juxtaposition of its ancient history with modernity.