Buon Compleanno, Roma! The BIG 2768!

Tomorrow, April 21, 2015, marks Rome's 2768th birthday, doesn't that make you feel like a spring chicken?! In 753 BC Romulus and his twin brother Remus founded a city on the seven hills along the Tiber River. When Romulus killed his brother he named the city for himself and thus Rome was born.

The saying may have started S.P.Q.R., Senatus Populusque Romanus, The Senate and People of Rome, but it grew into S.P.Q.R., "Sono pazzi questi romani," They are crazy these Romans." For years, 2,768 of them, Romans have proudly celebrated their city's birthday

through an array of spectacles from reenactments to concerts to firworks over the forum. Are they crazy for dressing up as gladiators and parading through the streets, or is this the key to longevity? While Romans may be a bit mad, afterall their city was founded out of violence and rage, the Romans know something about preservation and pride, and the rest of the world should take notes. Whenever I'm asked my stance on Rome's significance in the future I often laugh. The naysayers testify Rome and Italy as a whole will fall irrelevant in the next hundred years, and to that I offer this post. At it's height under emperor Trajan, Rome covered five million square miles with over 21% of the world's population, 70 million residents. Legacy 1. Today the ROMAnce languages are spoken by over 700 million people around the world, all derived by ancient Rome's Latin. Legacy 2. Great cities around the world, including our own capital, are specifically modeled after Rome and Roman architecture. Legacy 3... And then there's us, the Italian Americans, the Italian culturists, the Italo-philes, we will keep the Roman legacy alive and well. Buon Compleanno, Roma! Happy 2768th!