It’s dirty. The city puts the trash and recycling bins on the street for communal use, and that sounds like a great idea but they’re often overflowing and sometimes very stinky. It seems as though everyone smokes and throws the butts on the ground, and no one picks up after their dogs, so there’s shit—whole and in smears, where some unfortunate person has dragged their heel through it—all over the sidewalk. I’ve seen at least two men taking a piss on the sidewalk in the five months we’ve lived here.

The smog is terrible; I’m fairly sure the car pollution will take a few years off my lung capacity (assuming I’m not actually hit by a car first).

It’s inefficient. Italian bureaucracy is legendary for a reason: it’s because it’s so confusing that even Italians don’t always know how to make their way through it. There’s often a transit strike on Friday. The rumor is that that’s because people just want a three-day weekend (and in that, who can blame them? Especially when you consider how low the average Roman salary is).

Romans takes the whole “caput mundi” thing too far. Every single person here seems to operate under the impression that they are the most important person in Rome, so you had better get out of their way.

There are parts of the city that don’t seem like a city at all. Villa Pamphili is enormous and green. Some of it is busy and full of picnickers or exercisers or teenagers faffing off, but if you go further in, it’s lush and wild. I like to go there early, to stand on a certain hill and watch the sun come across the sky, where on some mornings I can look all around and not see another single person.

It’s good to be a morning person in Rome. I get up early to run before the streets get too crowded, watch the little cafes open up, hear the espresso machines whirr into action for the first cup of the morning. On the weekends, we go to our favorite bakery before the crowds and have our pick of the pastries. Everything there is a work of art, but their croissants integrale are some of the best croissants I’ve ever had, and believe me—I have made it a point to have a lot of croissants. On early dog walks, I stop at the fruit and veg market up the street from our apartment and for fresh produce. And what produce! I’ve never had mandarins so good, never been able to buy pears that you can take home and eat for breakfast that day, rather than letting them ripen in a paper sack for a week.

One day in December, I took the dog to the park in the morning, and could not believe the color, the quality of the sunlight. It hit the yellow leaves of a ginkgo tree and they shone. It hit the yellow walls of the Escher house and they glowed.

It’s good to be a night person in Rome. Dinner doesn’t really start here until 8:30 p.m.—most of the restaurants don’t even open until 7:30 p.m. I like the slow meals, the polpettine and conversation and wine, the plate of pasta and conversation and wine, maybe a dessert and conversation and then a digestivo and then a final espresso, and then the walk home. The streets are busy enough that I feel safe, but not so crowded that I can’t open my stride, enjoy walking hand-in-hand with my partner.

It’s good to be a foodie in Rome—see aforementioned croissants, produce, and dinners—but not if you want anything besides Italian food. The spice aisle in grocery stores is depressing, a few sad jars of dried basil and oregano, some chili flakes, salt and black pepper. The “international” section is three small shelves, partially hidden behind a post, with Skippy peanut butter, ramen noodles in a package, and hideously expensive coconut milk (if you’re lucky).

We took our friends to the Colosseum and in doing so saw an extravagant sweep of human history: looking out of the amphitheater, over the Forum, to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument, the streets closed off for construction of the new metro line, the streets lined with tourist shops and gelato places. It’s uncommon for an American to see so many years in one vista.

This is all Rome, and only a small part of it. It is the tourist dream (romantic cobblestone alleys and spritzes before lunch and beautiful ruins), la dolce vita. It is trash, noise, traffic, smell, and inefficiency. It is abundant contradiction. It is wholly itself, and in that, it is beautiful.