The Streets of Rome....

When I paint my masterpiece.....

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble

Ancient footprints are everywhere

  

Wandering around the remains of ancient Rome is a luxurious, stimulating, activity, which takes a lot of beating: Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, however, got it right - the streets are filled with rubble.....  In some places the actual street level has risen by ten metres in the last two thousand years, which is why you tend to look down on the excavations of the various fori and rediscovered temples.....

Though there is looking down..... and there is looking down.....

You can almost think that you're seein' double....

Rome does not need introduction – it is one of the most visited places on the planet.  But everyone sees it differently, depending on many variables. Some visitors are studious.  Some come for the dolce vita.  Accounts of what it was like to live in the city in ancient times are relatively uncommon (Satyricon, by Petronius, being a rare exception), but one extraordinary character left us several impressions of what it was like in the sixteenth century….

As we rode into Rome, the darkness was extreme; and when we came near the Banchi and our own house, my little horse was going in an amble at a furious speed.  Now that day they had thrown a heap of plaster and broken tiles in the middle of the road, which neither my horse nor myself perceived. In his fiery pace the beast ran up it; but on coming down upon the other side he turned a complete somersault.  He had his head between his legs , and it was only through the power of God himself that I escaped unhurt.... (Life of Benvenuto Cellini, 1558).

Then, after it became part of The Grand Tour, literature has been littered with descriptions of the ruins, though they are not all alike.  James Boswell was impressed:

Tuesday, 26 March, 1765:

We viewed the celebrated Forum.  I experienced sublime and melancholy emotions as I thought of all the great affairs which had taken place there, and saw the place now all in ruins, with the wretched huts of carpenters and other artisans occupying the site of that rostrum from which Cicero had flung forth his stunning eloquence….. We entered the famous Colosseum, which certainly presents a vast and sublime idea of the grandeur of the ancient Romans.  It is hard to tell whether the astonishing massiveness or the exquisite taste of this superb building should be more admired.

Thursday, 28 March, 1765:

We climbed to the Palace again, where the cypresses seem to mourn for the ruin of the grandeur of the Roman emperors.  The view from here is magnificent…..

James Boswell on the Grand Tour

Principal Domes L-R, Chiesa Nuova, S Andrea della Valle, S Carlo ai Catinari,
then the Pantheon and the Synagogue
(you can also see S Ivo, in scaffolding,
and, 35 miles to the north west, the Monti Cimini around Lago di Vico.)

The following year, Tobias Smollett was less so:

From the Capitol to the Coliseo, including the Forum Romanum and Boarium, there is nothing intire but one or two churches, built with fragments of ancient edifices.  You descend from the Capitol between the remaining pillars of two temples, the pedestals and parts of the shafts sunk in the rubbish..... 

(Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, 1766).

Then a couple of years later, Goethe, in self-imposed exile among German Romantics, found much to interest him:

I study the layout of Ancient Rome and Modern Rome, look at ruins and buildings and visit this villa or that. The most important monuments I take very slowly; I do nothing except look, go away, and come back and look again. Only in Rome can one educate oneself for Rome. 

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italian Journey, 1768).

In about 1810 Byron waxed lyrical:

Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown

Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped

On what were chambers, arch crushed, column strown

In fragments, choked up vaults, and frescos steeped

In subterranean damps, where the owl peeped,

Deeming it midnight: - temples, baths, or halls?

Pronounce who can; for all that learning reaped

From her research hath been, that these are walls –

Behold the Imperial Mount! ‘tis thus the mighty falls.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold, Canto IV,  stanza 107

 

A little later Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was less complimentary:

21^st September 1817:

I have now spent fifty days in mingled awe and indignation.  Why, what a thing of splendour were this site of Ancient Rome, had not her fatal star decreed, as crowning outrage, that the priests should build their new metropolis upon the very ruins of the old!  What glory might our eyes not still behold, were all those ancient stones – the Colosseum, the Pantheon,  the Antonine Basilica, together with that fabulous wealth of monuments, now rased to the ground that churches might be built instead – still proudly standing within their ring of deserted hills, the Aventine, the Quirinal,  the Mons Palatinus.  O fortunate city of Palmyra!

Rome, Naples and Florence, Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 1817

 

But then, just two years later, Byron’s friend, Shelley, was star struck:

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters:

Come to Rome.  It is a scene by which expression is overpowered; which words cannot convey….. The ruins of the ancient Forum are so far fortunate that they have not been walled up in the modern city….  I walk forth in the purple and golden light of an Italian evening, and return by star of moonlight, through this scene…..

What shall I say of the modern city?  Rome is yet the capital of the world.  It is a city of palaces and temples, more glorious than those which any other city contains, and of ruins more glorious than they.  Seen from any of the eminences that surround it, it exhibits domes beyond domes, and palaces, and colonnades interminably, even to the horizon…..  

(March 23^rd, 1819, to Thomas Love Peacock)

This is holy-week, and Rome is quite full….  Great festas and magnificent funzioni here – we cannot get tickets to all.  There are five thousand strangers in Rome, and only room for five hundred…..

In the Square of St Peter’s there are about three hundred fettered criminals at work, hoeing out the weeds that grow between the stones of the pavement. Their legs are heavily ironed, and some are chained two by two.  They sit in long rows, hoeing out the weeds, dressed in parti-coloured clothes.  Near them sit or saunter groups of soldiers, armed with loaded muskets.  The iron discord of those innumerable chains clanks up into the sonorous air, and produces, contrasted with the musical dashing of the fountains, and the deep azure beauty of the sky, and the magnificence of the architecture around, a conflict of sensations allied to madness.  It is the emblem of Italy – moral degradation contrasted with the glory of nature and the arts.  

(April 6^th, 1819, to Thomas Love Peacock)

Twenty-seven years later Charles Dickens was imaginatively sceptical:

It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so suggestive and distinct is it (The Colosseum) at this hour: that, for a moment -  actually in passing in – they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust, going on there, as no language can describe.  Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger, the next moment, like a softened sorrow; and never in his life, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions.

To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit…. To climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked and wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod.  It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin.  God be thanked: a ruin!

Charles Dickens, Pictures From Italy, 1846

In fiction, after another thirty-two years, Henry James, retouched the romantic fantasy:

A few days after his brief interview with her mother, he encountered her in that beautiful abode of flowering desolation known as the Palace of the Caesars.  The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender verdure.  Daisy was strolling along the top of one of those great mounds of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions.  It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as just then…..

Then he passed in among the cavernous shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent arena.  The place had never seemed to him more impressive.  One half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade; the other was sleeping in the luminous dusk.  As he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous lines, out of Manfred; but  before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors….

Henry James, Daisy Miller, 1878

Oh, the hours I've spent inside the Coliseum

Dodging lions and wastin' time

Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see 'em

Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

1902 and Hilaire Belloc arrived, to publish The Path to Rome, which ends with a discussion between the author and the reader: 

So, passing an Egyptian obelisk which the great Augustus had nobly dedicated to the Sun, I entered…..

LECTOR. But do you intend to tell us nothing of Rome?

AUCTOR: Nothing, dear Lector.

LECTOR. Tell me at least one thing; did you see the Coliseum?

AUCTOR….  I entered a café at the right hand of a very long, straight street, called for bread, coffee, and brandy, and contemplating my boots and worshipping my staff that had been friends of mine so long, and friends like all true friends inanimate, I spent the few minutes remaining to my happy, common, unshriven, exterior, and natural life, in writing down this

DITHYRAMBIC

EPITHALAMIUM or THRENODY

In these boots, and with this staff

Two hundred leaguers and a half –

…..

Nor ever turned my face to home

Till I had slaked my heart at Rome.

LECTOR. Bu this is dogg - -

AUCTOR. Not a word!

So, then, James Joyce, resident in Rome from 1906 to 1907, thought the ancient city was like a cemetery…The exquisite panorama he said, was made up of flowers of death, ruins, piles of bones, and skeletons.  On August 7^th, 1906, he wrote to his brother, Stanislaus, that the area around the Colosseum was like an old cemetery with broken columns of temples and slabs.  And on September 25^th he declared that Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.

Indeed, in jaundiced characteristic, Joyce reached back to Byron to express his distrust of the magnificence of the Imperial City, when he described a visit to the Colosseum with his family in 1907:

Looking at it all round gravely from a sense of duty, I heard a voice from London on one of the lowest galleries say:

            The Colisseum –

Almost at once two young men in serge suits and straw hats appeared in an embrasure.  They leaned on the parapet and then a second voice from the same city clove the calm evening, saying:

            Whowail stands the Colisseum Rawhm shall stand

            When falls the Colisseum Rawhm s’ll fall

            And when Rawhm falls the world sh’ll fall –

But adding cheerfully:

            -Kemlong, ‘ere’s the way aht-

James Joyce: letter to his brother Stanislaus Joyce, August 7^th, 1906

Seventy years later, and I was in Rome.  A much changed Rome.  But, despite all changes, there were still touches that reached back across the centuries.  Every day I crossed the Ponte Sisto from Trastevere toward the Campo Marzio, to catch the bus to work.  I used to pass a mournful fountain at the beginning of the Via Giulia, with its wide mouth (the ugliest fountain in Rome according to Augustus Hare) dribbling slow streams of water (though on one occasion at least it was made to spout wine).  

In the Campo de’ Fiori, a few paces further on, the Norcineria Viola 

- an outlet for the many products from the pig-heaven town of Norcia, now sadly, reduced to rubble (again) by the October earthquake) – still survives, though prettified, and without the model for that fountain, who graced the first floor window when I took this photo in the late seventies. 

In those days the market was strong with Roman dialect under the shadow of the statue of Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake here on February 17^th, 1600.

Giordano still stands here, unperturbed by his immolation, but the majority of stall holders now herald from the outlying fields of the Roman Empire, such as the Indian subcontinent, or North Africa…..

It’s always been a rough area: Benvenuto Cellini stabbed a man to death near here; I drew a little dagger with a sharpened edge, and breaking the line of his defenders, laid my hands upon his breast so quickly and coolly, that none of them were able to prevent me.  Then I aimed to strike him in the face; but fright made him turn his head round; and I stabbed him just beneath the ear.  I only gave two blows, for he fell stone dead at the second.  I had not meant to kill him; but as the saying goes, knocks are not dealt by measure….

On July 26^th, 1977, another death occurred here, when the brother of film actor Gian Maria Volontè, known as Claudio Camaso, stabbed a man who tried to intervene between Claudio and his wife.  Claudio made his escape, but gave himself up after ten days on the run, but then committed suicide in prison a few days later…..

I wander down the Via dei Banchi Vecchi, little changed since the days of Cellini or Camaso, and stop for refreshment in one of the few remaining Vino Olio shops in Rome, the Enoteca Il Goccetto.  

Such locali used to be where you could fill your bottles with wine from the Colli Albani and oil from anywhere.  In this case, I settle for a plate of mixed cheeses and salami and a glass of Pecorino DOC…..

Aaah.  And I rest, for a moment, from the turbulence of the Streets of Rome, the rubble and the rumour…..

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room

Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece

Actually Raffaello Sanzio's girlfriend, 'La Fornarina'
(but don't tell)
 

She promised that she'd be right there with me

When I paint my masterpiece

Train wheels runnin' through the back of my memory

As the daylight hours do retreat

Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody

When I paint my masterpiece

One day.....  Maybe.....

Firenze (Florence)

A Day in Florence

With recent advances in the services provided by Trenitalia, Florence is now only an eighty-minute trip from Rome.  What is more, you can book your own seats on the trains from home, on the Internet, and, with Eurostar, move comfortably and swiftly between cities.  In some ways this brilliant advance in transport may, however, be a drawback, making the world ever smaller.  It’s like the Apple or Blackberry.  It’s all so easy now; we take things for granted.  In the “good” old days, the first stop out of Rome on the way to Florence was at La Storta, where lunch at the Trattoria del Quarto Secolo might have given you the strength to make it as far as Campagnano, or perhaps Sutri, depending on whether you were travelling in style or tourist class.  Whatever else this meant, by the time you got to Florence, you were probably in need of at least five days rest, giving you time perhaps to see the major sights before moving on.  At today’s pace, you’ll do a bit of shopping in Via dei Calzaiuoli, have a bistecca alla fiorentina for lunch, and then back on the Eurostar to Rome for tea at Babington’s.

 

There are, however, variables and you don’t have to be so hurried.  Florence is a city of changeable weather, and I, for one, seem to have been quite unlucky on some of my visits.  The surrounding mountains and the nature of the Arno valley, combine to create a microclimate that can be very cold in winter or very heavy in summer.  And then, of course, it rains sometimes.  The first time I went there was the tenth anniversary of the 1966 floods, and it was very worryingly wet.  I squelched about the streets encountering shopkeepers uneasily checking their defences and entering churches that still bore the tide marks half way up the walls.  Subsequent trips have been icily cold, with winds like liquid nitrogen scouring down from the Casentino.  On other occasions it has been breathlessly hot, with brown clouds and an airlessness that gave even Michelangelo’s implacable David something of a headache.  On some occasions, however, I have been treated to perfection, and have greatly enjoyed afternoons in the Boboli gardens or on the Ex-Forte Belvedere (partially closed at present for restoration, but a delightful place to picnic and view the city below).

The weather is not a huge issue, however, for Florence is a very internal city – indeed perhaps this is because of the weather.  Massaccio’s Adam and Eve, bitterly ashamed of themselves for their stupid disobedience (or simply annoyed that they got caught?) care not a fig leaf for the climate, as their punishment is fixed within the Brancacci Chapel, roofed over by the strength of Santa Maria del Carmine.  From another point of view, perhaps, one of the delights of Florence for many visitors is to take hot chocolate in Café Rivoire on Piazza della Signoria (though my preference is for un espresso at Gilli’s on Piazza della Repubblica) and it’s the internal glitter, the antique but well-maintained opulence, that is the attraction.  Exteriors, by and large, in Florence (despite notable exceptions) don’t count for much.  Just look at the facades of San Lorenzo or Santo Spirito for confirmation – they just aren’t there.  The streets don’t really lend themselves to views; it is after all a cramped Roman settlement at a prestigious bridging point.  Buildings have risen on the original grid plan and the streets have become deeper and darker.  It is very hard to match outsides with the glories within in this proud and self-contained city.  Try to imagine what lies within the rough-hewn fortress of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi for instance, and then go and view Benozzo Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi (1459-1463) within.  The contrast between the vibrant colours and the exciting swirl of people and animals on the interior walls and the rugged, chipped and impregnable walls outside is, to use a local word, impressionante.  Despite, of course, the irony that the walls within depict outside scenes.  Almost as if the whole of life is an illusion.

Or a piece of theatre, which is coincidentally what I stumbled on in the vicinity of the Piazza della Signoria one cold and rainy December afternoon.  Some hundred or more mature citizens of Florence had got themselves into medieval costumes and, with a variety of weapons and musical instruments, were parading in a stop-start, heavy, slow procession.  Trumpets blared a tune, followed by martial drumbeats, and then, at someone’s imperceptible signal, the four characters in charge of the trundling cannon, set fire to the charge and all were deafened to a standstill.  And then it started again.  Police in escort, ladies and gentlemen, hand in hand.  Striped pantaloons, red shoes, steel helmets, halberds, pikes, and flags – the works.  As the crowd pressed in, the rain began to intensify, the whole troupe approached the Palazzo della Signoria, and, then….  it broke up.  Tourists had their photos taken arm in arm with five hundred year old gentlemen; the party was over.

I asked a frightened looking policeman what it was all about.  He hesitated, twitching like a rabbit with a stopwatch.  “Una manifestazione,” he explained.  “Scusi, devo andare.”  Leaving me feeling like Alice in a slightly awkward Wonderland.

And so, if it’s a phoney world, why go there?  Why does half the world knock on the door?  Could it be that this is perhaps the only place in the world where you can see a fur coat on a bicycle?  Could it be that this place has perhaps the greatest concentration of pictorial and sculptural riches anywhere in the world?   As with so much, some of it is a matter of opinion.  Some will argue that Michelangelo’s David is overbearing and disproportionate and that Cellini’s Perseus (and Donatello’s David) are too pretty and posy.  But the arguments will continue, because of personal opinion, and informed opinion at that.  Those that prefer Fra Angelico have plenty to see.  Those who enjoy the brightness and mannerist exuberance of Pontormo in Santa Felicita cannot complain, while those who love Domenico Ghirlandaio have only to go to Santa Trinita if they cannot get into the Refectory of Ognissanti (recently elevated to be a Benedictine Abbey, after the Franciscans moved on). 

Or, indeed, look inside Filippo Brunelleschi’s dramatic and elegant Ospedale Degli Innocenti in the busy Piazza Santissima Annunziata.  Within, apart from the offices of UNICEF, aptly housed in this ancient Foundling Hospital, you can find the masterpiece of Domenico Ghirlandaio, the Adoration of the Magi, as well as the beautiful Madonna col Bambino degli Innocenti. by Sandro Botticelli, which was painted between 1465 and 1467.  Or, again, slip into the Palazzo Davanzati,  one of the few remaining medieval Florentine houses, a palazzo signorile, which dates back to the 14^th century; it is an extraordinary, wonderfully decorated and furnished building, recently reopened after extensive works.  Internally, at least, Florence is a feast.  Enough to feed a thousand art history schools.

Externally, however, it does have a few glories.  There’s marble enough to interest the lapidarian, from Santa Croce, to Santa Maria Novella, to the Duomo to Giotto’s exquisite Campanile up to the gem on the hill of San Miniato del Monte, (which is as good inside as out).  And when up on the hill, rest awhile and gaze back over the town and its coursing river.  You can see why the Romans needed it, and why everyone else since has kept it on the map.  You can perhaps understand why Dante loved the place so much, and why, for a while at least, it was capital of the new Italy. 

And when you have done musing, wander down the hill again and try one of the Hostarie in Via San Niccolo, or walk on back to the central market and sniff out the Trattoria Gozzi, where, despite the demise of the imposing Sergio himself a few years ago, the enduring standards of friendliness and honesty are practised by his son.  It’s only open for lunch, but their food is procured daily from the adjacent covered market and prepared in traditional Tuscan ways.  Ribollita, aqua cotta, pappa del pomodoro; excellent red wine, first class meat.  Its welcoming interior lit by bright chandeliers that reflect off the Della Robbia (type) ceramics on the walls.  Only now, I notice, the chandeliers are burning energy efficient bulbs, a faultless piece of modernisation, that perhaps matches the practical resourcefulness and famous intelligence of the Florentines.

And if that was the lunch, an eighty-minute nap on the train back to Rome will do just nicely!

Trattoria Toscana Gozzi Sergio

Piazza San Lorenzo, 8r, Florence, Italy

(no website)