Thread by @TODreamsProject

1. High atop the Capitoline Hill, you’ll find a piazza designed by Michelangelo and the world’s oldest museum — where a Canadian knight once came to change time itself.

2. The Capitoline is one the famous seven hills of Rome. Once the heart of Ancient Rome’s ceremonial life, it was redesigned by Michaelangelo into the piazza of today.

3. The square is home to Rome’s city hall and the world’s oldest museum: old palaces filled with art and artifacts and opened to the public in the 1700s.

4. But I’ve come to the top of the famous hill because of something that happened in the late 1800s: some of the world’s leading scientists met here to discuss time.

5. They were debating an idea by a Canadian engineer. Sandford Fleming believed that rather than every local clock tower being set to its own local time — with slightly different times everywhere — the world should be divided up into time zones.

6. Fleming was already establishing himself as major figure in Canada, helping to build the railroad and designing our first stamp — among many other things.

He’s even in the famous Last Spike photo: the guy in the tall hat behind the guy with the hammer.

7. He called his new idea Cosmic Time. And in 1883 he was leading the charge to adopt if, giving a big speech here atop the Capitoline Hill at the thrillingly-named Seventh International Geodesic Conference.

8. Those gathered here agreed with Fleming. Now the big debate was about where to put the prime meridian. Paris? London? The Great Pyramid in Egypt? It was a heated political battle.

9. “Prime meridian, prime meridian. I’m sick of prime meridian,” Fleming complained.

10. In the end, they would put it in London — at Greenwich. And Sanford Fleming, time lord, would eventually be knighted for his contributions to science and engineering.

11. So on my first full day in Rome, I left a dream for Fleming here on the Capitoline Hill, where he once came to change the way the world keeps time.