Echoes of the Empire

You feel it before you can name it — that the ground you are walking was walked by people who built an empire and then watched it fade, and that the streets simply kept going. Rome does not perform its history for you. It carries it the way an old person carries a long life: lightly, and everywhere at once.

In the great arcades the light comes down in shafts and a single figure crosses the marble, dwarfed and unbothered, as if grandeur were just the weather here. Everything is older than us. The empire is gone and the echo remains, humming in the stone, in the shutters, in the long afternoon shadows.

I came to photograph monuments and left having photographed time instead.