You cannot miss the enormous white marble monument in front of you. Blinding, tiered, covered in columns and bronze horses, roughly the size of a small mountain. This is the Vittoriano, built to honor Italy's first king and the unification of the country. It cost a fortune, it took about fifty years, and Romans have spent every one of those years making fun of it.
They call it the wedding cake. They call it the typewriter. They call it the dentures. The marble is a glaring white that refuses to age and blend in with the warm old stone around it, so it just sits there, permanently looking brand new and slightly wrong. That's partly because the marble was hauled in from the north of the country precisely because it stays so bright — which is exactly why it never fits in. To build the thing, the city knocked down a chunk of the medieval neighborhood that used to cover this hill. Romans have never quite forgiven it, and the nicknames are the revenge.
Under all the bombast, though, the mo
nument does one quiet, serious thing. At its center burns an eternal flame over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — an unidentified Italian killed in the First World War, chosen to stand for every soldier who never came home. Two guards keep watch over that flame every hour of every day, and have since nineteen twenty-one. So Romans mock this building relentlessly and still go silent at its heart. B
