Andrea
Snow paralyzes Rome. Yesterday I tried to schedule an interview for today, but the woman simply responded that “Rome will be frozen,” in a sort of “why would you leave your house when it’s snowing outside” way. Being from Wisconsin, where the only two seasons are winter and road construction, this is hard for me to comprehend. How does less than one inch of snow bring a city to its knees? Yes, I understand that the city is not equipped with snowplows, salt, and shovels to the degree that my home state is, but the idea of a whole city holing up in their homes due to a light dusting is still funny to me. The ancient Romans pumped their water in from miles outside the city, built some of the grandest structures in the world, and conquered the Mediterranean and half of Europe, so why do the modern Romans fret over a bit of snow? What did the ancient Romans do when it snowed? Pray to Jupiter to make it stop? It’s all over the news; “maltempo” (bad weather) all over Italy and the trains, buses, and planes are not running because of it. Oh, if only they knew what kind of weather I walked to class in when I was a student. The former UW chancellor’s concept of what constitutes a snow day would horrify the Italians...
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