eternallycool.net

There are members of the eCool Team who have started to call the Compound by another name–sweat lodge.  It’s mid-August and it’s just plain hot in Rome.  That heat doesn’t keep the eCool team from showing up for work.  Oh no!  They’re here bright and early, slogging away at their computers, trying to think of clever things write, trying to find amazing things to post, and generally trying to work out the proof that informs the equation (Rome = Eternally Cool).

Each day by about 2pm, however, the eCoolers have had it.  Despite our instance that they need to stay and work and despite the fact that we provide them them with an unending supply of cold coffee and other iced beverages, each afternoon there’s a moment when our highly-paid team just deserts us.  They say that they’re heading out into the streets to look for eCool material.  We know that no one in their right minds would wander the streets of Rome in the middle of the afternoon in August.  And we know that they’re really sitting in air-conditioned bookstores reading trashy vampire novels, but we don’t press the point.

Every once in a while, however, our team does return to the Compound with something ultra-awesome.  Dripping with sweat, they download their photos onto the eCool computer and then show us something so amazing that we cease to care what they’re doing with their time and lavish praise upon them.  That exact series of events happened recently and so today we’re happy to share with you the photo that our badass team brought home late last week.

It’s a stencil that currently embellishes a wall flanking Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, quite near the Colosseum.   A Roman centurion–the kind that poses for a picture with you outside the Colosseum and then demands an exorbitant price for the privilege–stands holding a paint roller in his hand.  Above him are the words “When in Rome.”  Are we meant to read him as the artist of this oh-so-apropos artwork? (The artist, by the way, seems to have claimed their work here in the form of a signature below the figure that reads “Above.”)  Or are we meant to see him as representing an antiquated authority figure who will come and erase this bit of stupendous stencil work with another coat of paint.  We don’t know the answer but we love this addition to the streetscape.