November 19, 2020

Towns Named Rome

By roads-rus

Unlike Berlin and Warsaw, Rome has not been an especially popular town name. There are about 15 of them scattered about the USA, but considering the number of Italian immigrants who came to the US few of them apparently decided to name their new towns Rome after their birth city. Perhaps not enough of them came from the main population center in Italy, a big city with close to 3 million residents, a considerable history, and an inexhaustible number of tourist attractions.

The 2 biggest Romes in the USA are in Georgia and New York. The real town of Rome, Wisconsin, has a population of less than 3,000. The fictional one was in a popular TV series called “Picket Fences”. Rome is also the name of a county in Kansas, which is a state has no town named Rome.

Rome, Italy, is one of the few cities on this planet that surrounds an entire country. Vatican City is, however, the smallest country in the world. Ruth & I were lucky enough to have a friend attached to the Vatican for 9 years so that we could stay very near it and get to know it well. Our favorite thing to do was to shop in the many little markets nearby and then go back to his residence and prepare a Roman feast. This was fun until someone in a Roman food store chose to submit a charge of 500 euros instead of the actual 50 euros we spent. Our feasts never contained Rome apples, which are somewhat popular in the American Midwest because they originated in Ohio. Rome apples were not good for eating but delicious in pies.

Rome’s nickname is “The Eternal City” and that suits it for many reasons. One unfortunate characteristic of it is its placement. It’s attractively situated on 7 hills and the Tiber River but 15 miles from a seaport and far from its inconvenient international airport. On the other hand, it’s close enough to some excellent towns like Viterbo and Florence to be a day-trippers delight. It has very popular attractions like The Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Colosseum but some lesser visited but excellent places like The Pantheon, the Via del Corso, and the National Museum of Pasta at 141 Flaminia.

One website said there are Romes on every continent except Antarctica, but when I googled Rome, Asia, nothing came up; and if there was a Rome in Africa, and there probably was, it no longer exists.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2020 at 11:22 pm and posted in Town Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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