What can a son teach his mother about antiquity? It's 22 years since I was last in Rome, a wide-eyed 24-year-old on my very first trip to Europe. The future lay ahead of me, an unwritten story, a place of blank pages to be filled with everything this expansive new world had to offer.
In Rome I tasted gnocchi for the first time and dodged ranting drivers on streets too narrow even for the toy cars that whizzed up and down them. I touched the foot of the Pieta, and threw a coin into the Trevi Fountain.
Now I am back here with my 20-year-old son on his own first trip to Europe. It must be true, I tell him, that if you throw a coin into the Trevi Fountain you will return to Rome.
But the world looks different when seen through the eyes of someone much younger than oneself. As we cross the Tiber River on our way into the old city my son strains for a better look. 'Oh man,' he says. 'This city is awesome.'
As the Colosseum comes into view, his face is overcome with the same expression of wonder he wore as a little boy poring over his favourite book, The Big Book of Knowledge, his eyes widening at the enormity of it all, his eyebrows rising and falling in tune with the tales he was being told.
I recall the art projects we would do at home with his two sisters, the Roman egg-shell mosaics we made and the picture books filled with gods and goddesses we read. I'm thrilled to be back in Rome, but my impression of it is filtered through the prism of my son's experience; the world is a much clearer place now that 22 years have elapsed, now that the future is no longer an unwritten story.
You can never see a city again for the very first time, and so instead I observe my son as the world he's inhabited through books and stories comes alive before his own eyes. His greatest fascination with this city is not its stand-alone antiquities, but the graffiti that blooms all around them in lavish swirls and curlicues and blunted lines.
To me, these are displays of tasteless vandalism; to him they are the blurring of ancient and modern, of obedience and individualism. They are direct challenges to the sort of conformity that stunts societies' growth. They are