21 February 1999
Copyright, 1999, Max K. Goff, all rights reserved

I landed in Rome early Friday morning after an short night flight across the Atlantic.  I'm fortunate in that I fly enough to qualify for frequent upgrades -- hence, I flew business class, which is always a bonus when flying overseas.  I did manage to sleep a bit, though not much as my seat mate had a tendency to snore and had no problems sleeping otherwise.  An investment banker out of Manhattan, he seemed rather grumpy at having to cross the pond yet again for a single day of business.  That was the extent of our exchange.  I respected his need for solitude.

It's been almost 27 years since I last visited Rome.  I frankly don't remember all that much of my first visit here in the summer of 1972.  That was my expatriate year, a year of transition, a year of personal reinvention.  I dropped out of the McGovern campaign, an idealistic undergraduate volunteer,  and left for Europe with a friend from college to work in a factory in Germany and ultimately to travel the continent in a Volkswagen micro van.  Rome was one of the cities we visited.

My objective the first day here was to find an internet cafe.  Now you would think such a thing would be rather easy to locate in a major western cosmopolitan city like Rome.  I'd forgotten to print out the directions for my speaking engagement on Monday, and as such needed to find internet access.  An internet cafe seemed to be the logical thing, adding to my experiences with internet cafes in other locales.

The first place I found, near the Spanish Stairs where my Roman hotel was located, did have three PCs on the second floor of a cafe that served a busy shopping district street.  The price for an hour of access time was 10,000 Lira, approximately US$6 at the current exchange rate.  Not bad -- more than Amsterdam, but not bad.  Unfortunately, either their ISP was down or the machines were misconfigured.  Since no one was using the machines, and no one at the cafe seemed to know much about them, I couldn't be sure.  So the first place I tried turned out to be a failure.  I asked the proprietor where I might find another internet cafe.  He directed me to the train station, and wrote down on a piece of paper the stop I needed:  Stazione Termini.

Finding the Stazione Termini was not difficult, as apparently it means "Terminal" in Italian, the meeting point of a number of subway lines.  I got off, looked around, asked several individuals and no one had any idea where I might find an internet cafe or internet access otherwise.  I was starting to get discouraged.  It finally dawned on me to stop at a hotel and ask the concierge, which is what I did.  He was kind enough to give me a card to yet another spot, which a $10 cab ride found for me.

And then I knew I had found Mecca.  Inside were at least 20 PCs, many of which were in use.  The walls sported symbols of the Internet Age -- the Egyptian Ankh, flying saucers, little gray men -- I was home.  Despite the fact that access times were abysmally slow, with the hour I bought (for only 8,000 Lira) I did manage to find the information I needed and even checked my rapidly filling mailbox at Sun for a quick look, leaving most of the messages unread until I return home.  Once again, my faith was validated.  Once again, I connected and felt at peace.  Once again, I was home.
I found digital communion in Rome, albeit slow, amidst the ruins of several previous civilizations.  The new civilization lives here too.