In freezing times like these, for God's sake don't use a blowtorch to try to unfreeze pipes, BWSC says

Even your lecturer's dates are somewhat arbitrary. Why stop at 1453? The Western Empire was definitively done by 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor in the West, accepted the generous offer of Odoacer (a barbarian general of uncertain heritage) to retire to a villa in Campania. Odoacer became King of Italy. The Eastern Empire, which spoke Greek rather than Latin, continued for another millennium, but was it Roman? It claimed to be, but there have been other claimants. Long before the Eastern Empire was conquered, on Christmas day in 800, the ruler of a Germanic tribe named the Franks, Charlemagne, was consecrated as Emperor of the Romans, in Rome, by the Pope. That version of the Roman Empire survived in one form or another until it was finally euthanized by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806.

In reality the Roman Empire died so gradually, of so many causes and in so many places, that there is no saying when or why it fell. It's obvious that the Holy Roman Empire that Napoleon declared defunct in 1806 was not the Roman Empire in any meaningful sense (neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, as Voltaire said). Was the little Byzantine rump state of Constantine XI Palaiologos that Mehmet II conquered in 1453, which by that point did not even rule Greece, let alone Italy, any more Roman than the Holy Roman Empire?