Whille reading about this, I got a strong sense that I ought to take my own family “back” to Rome, as well as to Milan and Germany, to re-connect with these illustrious ancestors of ours, who hardly anybody today knows anything about.
 
That feeling hasn’t left me since.
 
It’s not just wanting to see places where history was made, or bask second-hand (and un-earned) in the glories of my distinguished forebears.  I feel equally compelled to visit the tiny little hometown of the ancestor I get my surname from—a common farm laborer—and specifically, to walk along the road he would have taken when he was courting his future wife.
 
The prospect of visiting the most beautiful and exotic places in the world is nowhere near as attractive to me as the possibility of spending a lot of time in, say, dusty libraries or obscure government archives to locate and finally set foot in whatever might be left of my ancestors’ castles in Milan.

I now jokingly speculate that given the strength of this urge to return to places of my origin, I might also be part salmon.