Wherever I look there is chaos. I stand in a dark curved side street between two tall brick buildings, green vines grow after many years slithering up the sides, and block the sunlight begging to reach my face. Taking one step on the broken cobblestone, I crossover into Piazza Navona in Rome, Italy. The piazza is a football field sized oval shape with ten jagged-road alleyways that release gallons of people pouring into it from all different directions at the exact same time like the Roman Aqueducts. People come at me, emerging out of nowhere it seems, from all angles and directions.

I pause.

Speed up.

Go around.

Dodge.

Retreat.

Always in a state of chaotic dance to get out of the way of busy tourists on tight schedules, waiters heckling me to eat at their tables, couples that kiss intimately with not a care in the world as to who may be watching, Italian soldiers with AK-47 rifles locked and loaded as they stand guard out front of Sant’Agnese Church in Agone in the instance of an ISIS terrorist attack, the hundreds of pick-pocket thieves that hide out as they carefully choose their next victim, the Indian men who wave selfie sticks in my face and try to woo me into buying counterfeit-crafted scarves draped moderately over their forearms in waves of colorfully stitched patterns, and gypsies who on occasion come up to me carrying a blonde-haired blue-eyed child in their arms begging for money to which I sternly say “no” because I know that poor baby was stolen from its biological mother for the sole purpose of using him for committing multiple acts of thievery.

As I progress down the cobblestone piazza pigeons flap their colorful pink, grey, and blue wings frantically because I almost step on one. Pigeons are not my favorite because one nose-dived right into my head, its claws pulling a thin thread of hair out of my scalp. Continuing on my journey to the perfect spot, I pass through portals of art. Merchants set up their artwork on the ground, on canvases, on buckets in the middle of the piazza. Lovely paintings of landscapes of Tuscany, the Collosseum, a bowl of apples and oranges. Most art work not belonging to the merchant but being resold so he can make a few euros. Some merchants are their artwork. I watch the man dressed up in Arabian Knights clothing as he hovers three feet off the ground, the man who paints himself all bronze stand as still as a statue until a type of currency is thrown his way because in that instance he will suddenly come to life and do mime imitations, and the two men wearing ridiculous dress suits with bow ties and a hat attached without a head. How they can sit in a suit in 70 degree weather will always be a mystery to me. But then again Italy’s economy flourishes off of tourism; it’s their main source of income. It’s a game of chaos—bargaining. I’ve learned that they’ve been at this game their whole lives and I’m just a young American girl morphing herself into a culture I know very little about. I go for it anyway, bargaining in Italian for a scarf priced at 15 euros that now becomes mine for ten. My professor in Italy said, “Bargaining is a way of life, a game, and you must know that a merchant will never say yes to your offer if he wasn’t making a profit out of it.” It’s all just one big beautifully chaotic game and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t thrilling

My favorite artist in the piazza is the man who paints lovely images using nothing but spray paint and fire. His clothes are full of paint and hands covered in so much color I can’t even tell if they’re in fact his hands anymore. His curly dark brown hair is wrapped in a bun with flecks of paints scattered in it. The radio next to him blares static music on what must be a soundtrack because the same three songs play repeatedly. One is familiar to me. It’s a song written by Pitbul but he’s singing all in Spanish. The other songs sound like they originated in Mexico or Spain and I can’t help but feel the vibes radiating off of the man as he does neat tricks with the spray cans—flipping them crazily but controlled in the air. You can tell he knows what he’s doing even if it’s in a manner of complete chaos. I can’t peel my eyes off him. He sprays a bunch of lines of colored spray paint that make absolutely no sense or image; kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting. In the end, he creates an image of a waterfall in the forest or jungle somewhere and I am the first to buy it. He shakes my hand and winks at me with a sweet, “thank you.” It was the best 10 euros I ever spent in my life.

Italy is nothing but chaos.