Rome Rushed Me, Florence Slowed Me, Venice Broke the Rules 🇮🇹

Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Journal 0

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Rome. Florence. Venice. Three cities that taught the world what civilization looks like.

Rome

I started in Rome — and Rome doesn’t ease you in. The Colosseum appeared between two apartment blocks on a random Tuesday morning, and for a moment I forgot it was nearly 2,000 years old. That’s what Rome does. It treats history like furniture. The Pantheon has been standing since 125 AD with the same unreinforced concrete dome — the largest in the world for 1,300 years. Engineers still study it. Romans just walk past it on the way to coffee.

Florence

Florence felt different. Quieter. The Duomo dominates every sightline in the city, but the real weight is inside the workshops and side streets where the Renaissance was actually built. Brunelleschi spent 16 years constructing that dome without scaffolding — no one believed it was possible. The city still carries that energy. Not loud ambition. Stubborn, patient craft.

Venice

Venice I almost wasn’t ready for. You step off the train and there are no roads. No cars. Just water and stone and 118 islands connected by 400 bridges. The city shouldn’t exist — it was built on wooden pilings driven into a lagoon by people who decided the sea wasn’t a problem, it was an address. Every canal reflects a building that someone built knowing the water would always be rising. Three cities. Three different ways of telling the world: we were here, and we meant it. *Next week — Croatia. A coastline the Romans knew but the world forgot.

Next week I’ll be hopping over to Croatia 👋

— Beyondia

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