ON OUR LAST NIGHT IN ROME, we went over to St. Peter’s Basilica to see it in the evening light. I have fallen in love with this city, its people, its beauty. I will be back.

My time here in Europe impresses upon me the most striking difference between here and the United States: Europe has an abundance of time; America has an abundance of space.

European cities use space very differently than in the American cities. European cities are far more densely built, with most buildings meeting the sidewalk at grade. Shops are on the ground floor and apartments or offices are built above.

Romans have been using this pattern for a very long time. There are relics here and there in the older part of Rome of the old Insulae, the four and five story apartment buildings where most Roman citizens lived in the days of the Empire. It struck me how similar they were, in terms of their basic layout and appearance, to the buildings that most Romans live in today.

There is a sort of progression of privacy in European cities. The streets, squares, parks and monuments are the public realm. The center of every block is a more private space enclosed by the buildings that line the streets.

These little “outdoor rooms” have a variety of uses, often in the same space – parking for cars, places to do laundry, perhaps a rear entrance to one of the ground floor shops, and so on.
Finally, the interiors of the apartments are the realm of intimate family life.

But after a week exploring the Eternal City, we set out from Rome in the early morning while it was still dark.

As our train made its way out of the Roman metropolis and into the Umbrian countryside to the north, the sky turned a soft amber color at first light, and we saw farms and fields resolve and disappear in and out of a curling blue-gray ground fog.

By the time we got into Tuscany, the sun was up and we watched the gentle Italian countryside begin its day. Mile after mile, I saw barns made of stone with variegated tile roofs sitting in fields ripe for the harvest, with columnar poplars and cypresses delineating the fields. It looked like some of the more pastoral paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. The yellow-brown fields, the mossy stone walls, the twisted cypress were all in the palette of colors Van Gogh used in his later work.

Some of the barns and outbuildings we saw from our windows as our train glided by looked quite old, as old as some of the surviving Roman imperial buildings we had visited in the previous week. For all I know, some of them might well have been in continuous use since the days of the Caesars.

It occurred to me that in America, a thousand-year-old barn would be a national historic landmark; in Italy it is merely a place where farmer Giovanni keeps his hay.

That’s the thing about Europe – they long ago figured out the best way of doing things like building barns, and have seen no need to change merely because of the invention of new materials. A stone barn is actually a good idea. If there’s a fire – and a building filled with straw is going to be a fire hazard – you just need to build a new roof, interior accessories and doors, and you’re as good as new.

Italy gets richer the farther north you go. I noticed this as we neared Milan in late morning. There were an increasing number of factories and industrial plants, and I also noted that the look of the cities changed from the standard Roman street plan to something more utilitarian and less aesthetically pleasing.

I began to see the sort of bland, characterless “mid-rise” apartment buildings that deface the landscape in the richer parts of the world, places that sacrifice beauty on the altar of efficiency and pay no respects to history or local cultures or customs.

We changed trains in Milan in late morning and proceeded north toward Zurich, Switzerland.

Speaking of Switzerland, if you’re aiming for efficiency, you could do worse than to imitate the Swiss. Switzerland is a seriously orderly country. The whole way to Zurich, I never saw graffiti. The roads were clean enough to eat off of, and it seemed like the kind of place where even the roadside weeds would line themselves up in neat little rows.

Even in sleek Switzerland, however, there was evidence everywhere of traditions still kept and a past still honored, as seen in the architecture of the chalets on the mountainsides and the snug, densely-built little villages that clung firmly to the alpine mountainsides as if put there by nature itself.

I’ll have some thoughts on Paris, where we are now, next week.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.