The truth is I hated Rome. I immediately turned to Las Vegas, conjuring up an even less familiar analogue to circumvent a single evening alone. The crowd density was enough for me to lean in to this comparison in order to get through to my suicide flight the following morning.
What do these two landmark-ridden consumer sites share? Rome is littered with Las Vegas-like tourists, subjects rendered predictable and immobile, utterly governed by the panopticon pull of what to consume next. It’s not like this isn’t happening on a global scale, let alone a digital one, but it’s made explicit by the material effects of monumentalism. Simply put: here lie the remnants, the remainders, of an Empire’s hubris.
Las Vegas’ hubris makes itself known especially after you’ve traversed the desert, the strip becoming rapidly in competition with the natural world to its left to the point the natural world is replete with touristic selfie taking enough to eviscerate fifteen of them on an annual basis. The Grand Canyon turned hyperreal means you don’t have to watch your step until you have no steps left to take. When in Rome everyone wants to capture it, capture an image where they stand at the forefront of an Empire that fell. Summoning the body count discovered on Phantom Ranch, tourists in Rome also don’t watch their step, flocking to capture Rome’s still-standing memory and some byline to do with crisis and ingenuity.
Both sites are perverse variations on reality, harkening to Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical treatise on Simulacra and Simulation. Las Vegas is terrifying as is Rome. Sure, it could be the mass, the scale, that did my small by comparison psyche in. But maybe it also had something to do with the capitalist machinery blowing behind the ears of these two monumentally stacked sites. Idealism, egoism abound intermixed with precisely the kind of truth relayed to me by some basic understanding of simulacrum: that which musters together a merry assortment of signs and signifiers to create some version of reality to believe in and have your desires totally determined by. That’s precisely what terrified me: to be completely immersed in reality, in a truth that does absolutely nothing to conceal itself. In Rome and Las Vegas there are no unknowns. Everything is available. Like someone new wanting too much, I want none of it for more than an evening. When everyone’s pasta is the best pasta because everyone’s mama is the best mama, that in concert with my own company finding escape by way of the search for the best, is enough to want to hide under the covers in some insomniac state of too much self-awareness.
The remainders in Rome are not, of course, a copy, as is presented by what adorns Las Vegas’ sprawl. What could the following stage of the sign-order look like when the maintenance and conservation of the Colosseum becomes its own kind of copy? I suppose this is also an encounter with the Disneyfication of the world, where a trip to Rome conjures memories of a past trip to Las Vegas, rendering these experiences as the same in order to better understand the pull of one over the other. The overarching sense of uniformity among the tourists is frightening when you are one. Where’s that cliffside when you need it? The thing is I never hated Las Vegas.