The road to rome was paved in Italy tee

This saying means that you may not be in a certain state of being, experience or end point, but you are well on your way. An alternative is "The road to rome starts in Italy" which means that you are on the brink of your journey to an experience or situation and should get started or step away if you want/don't want to end up there. It can be used with a positive bent but is more often used as a a warning or judgment that someone is on the path to something unwanted, harmful, life altering, undoable, or disaster. As the saying originated from a member of the Appalachian diaspora the grammatical feature of X impact Y can be applied to this saying, (for example its colder than a witches titty could also be adjusted to its hotter than a pig in a frying pan), but the geographical implication must be clear to the listener. In this case Rome was an influential empire that impacted everywhere it touched, rose with power and fell in disgrace and was generally both a place to gain favor, fame or fortuned, but also a place to be corrupted, backstabbed or run into a malignant unhinged dictator or be sold as a slave. Regardless, once there its impossible to erase the impacts of Rome and the time to turn around is before or while in Italy.