Protestant Cemetery - Rome, Italy

Protestant Cemetery - Rome, Italy

Italy | Sunday, September 4, 2011 | 5 photos

Just a few weeks into my four-month stint in Rome, Italy, last year, out-of-the-way corners of the city began to emerge and establish themselves as the adventures that would define my time there. Tucked under the Pyramid of Cestius and partially blocked off from nearby traffic by the old Aurelian Wall, it is an almost silent enclave where famous names like John Keats and Antonio Gramsci are found etched into well-preserved headstones.

The visits I made to the Protestant Cemetery were a reminder of the importance of detail in photography. Rome is a place of a million stories, and even if you concentrate on one there are any number of angles you chan choose to portray. Picking through them at the cemetery and focusing on the ones that truly mattered was a lesson in conciseness that I have carried with me since.

Now that I am back in the United States, I am a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am editor-in-chief at the Badger Herald, the largest independent student newspaper in the nation, and hoping to make a career out of a combination of travel writing and photography after graduation next spring. I have interned at SUN Newspapers in Minnesota, the Wisconsin State Journal and, most recently, the Onion and offManhattan.com in New York City.