Venice unmasked

Dimenticare Venezia

In 1892, in Italian Hours, Henry James wrote that, Venetian life, in the large old sense, has long since come to an end, and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tombs.

 
In 1956, Mary McCarthy (an American critic and novelist, 1912 – 1989) wrote, in Venice Observed, And there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities – Rome or Florence or Naples.  The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian’s, Quadri’s, Torcello, Harry’s Bar, Murano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto.  Venice is a folding picture postcard of itself.

 
Both these statements, I believe, ring true today, but neither should be taken as the last word. Many other writers have added their pennyworths to the pile of thoughts that Venice inspires.  Charles Dickens, in Pictures from Italy (1846) dreamt of buildings that were high and low, and black, and white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.....  He fancied he saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built up with shops and humming with the tongues of men.....  Jan (then James) Morris wrote in 1960 that, In Venice the past and the present are curiously interwoven.....and that Melancholia contributes strongly to the Venetian atmosphere.  

Joseph Brodsky, in Watermark (1992), referred to the chiming of bells, his room flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers.....  

More recently, in Venice is a Fish (2000), Tiziano Scarpa suggests that the visitor to Venice should put on very dark sunglasses....  Venice can be lethal, he says.  In the historic centre the aesthetic radioactivity is extremely high.  

Every angle radiates beauty; apparently shabby; profoundly devious, inexorable.  The sublime pours in bucketloads from the churches, but even the calli without monuments, the bridges to the rii, are picturesque at the very least.

My love affair with Venezia has lasted almost fifty years, though over those years we have both aged and changed.  It may be a platitude to say that the magic has worn a little thin, and that I feel a little less excited about our relationship than perhaps I did when I first set foot in La Serenissima.  But I guess the feeling is reciprocal – she loves me a little less too.  I am just one of millions of admirers, and the restauranteurs and the gondoliers know it.  

There is nothing special about me.

So, during my recent stay, in a tiny quiet apartment above a courtyard in the Santa Croce sestiero, 

a step away from the delightful Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, 

I retrace the steps of many years, revisiting the great churches of the Frari and Saints Giovanni and Paolo, the Salute, 

San Giorgio Maggiore, as well as, of course, San Marco.  

I climb campanili to see the views across the city and the lagoon to the distant Dolomiti.  

I wander over the Rialto, through the markets, through the Correr, the Accademia, the Scuole (dei Carmini, Grande di San Rocco, 

di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni), the Guggenheim, 

the great Palazzi (Ducale, Ca’ Rezzonico, Ca’ Pesaro).  I visit La Fenice (for Il Barbiere di Siviglia), having not been there since I went with Amanda before the fire....  I visit the campi (too many to mention) and the islands (Murano with its flamboyant glass, multi-coloured Burano, 

silent Torcello, 

the Lido with its Adriatic strand 

and Giudecca with its busy boatyards).....  

In the Arsenale we see a magical show about Casanova, boats and floats and acrobats, and projections on fountains. 

 

And with every step come memories but also new pleasures as the light changes, and I see things I hadn’t noticed before.  The Carnival adds spice and splendour, 

the old Bacari replenish flagging spirits, 

various trattorie fill my belly (but drain my wallet) with bigoli in salsa, risotto di nero di seppia, pasta e fagioli, moleche (soft-shelled crabs), branzino (sea bass), pesce san Pietro (John Dory), all lubricated with copious glasses of Tai (Venetian Tocai) or Soave (et alios).....  

My love is rekindled and, as the weather turns from rain and cold to crystal clear skies and gentle breezes, I relax into a routine of living once more all’Italiana: a cappuccino and cornetto con crema at Lavena, then a walk, as Tiziano Scarpa recommends: The first and only itinerary I suggest to you has a name.  It’s called: at random.  Subtitle: aimlessly.....  Getting lost is the only place worth going to.....  I feel a new sense of delight in every calle, every sottoportico, every campo.  Here you can sit and dream.  Here you can immerse yourself in a book 

or just take the sun with your floppy dog.  

There you can compose a sketch, 

or sip a spritz. 

I like to watch the world go by.  It is reassuring to see people going about their lives in this timeless place.  

And I love to exchange a cheeky glance here and there.....

And then as the days spin away, the sun falls, 

the moon and stars appear above the rooftops, 

and the canals become deep dark alleys lit only by the occasional lamp.  I love the close dark silence, just sometimes broken by a lonely splash.  I love the mellow warmth of the crumbling walls.  

It can be eerily quiet – so many palazzi now are uninhabited, and very few are the animal sounds of the night.

I even get so lost in my reveries that I photograph a man with a mop of silver hair leaning on a bridge without realising who he is.  

Later I discover that if I had £8,450 to spare I could have indulged in six days (partly) in the company of acclaimed architect and descendant of an ancient Venetian dynasty, Francesco da Mosto to discover the layered history of the Floating City, exploring its waterscapes, architecture and artworks.  

Ah well!  Another time....

But will there be another time?  There are other places.  Beautiful and unique as Venice is I feel this may have been the last time.  So now, perhaps, is the time to forget Venice, as in Dimenticare Venezia, the 1979 film written and directed by Franco Brusati which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but which tied for the 1979 David di Donatello Award for Best Film with The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Christ Stopped at Eboli (it was a very good year!)

The film isn’t really about Venice at all, but I know it because one of my students at the time had a role in it and that was quite something. The main point here is that there comes a time when decisions must be made, and relationships may be more important than seeking diversion in fanciful plans.  

I love Venice, and had a really good time there this year, but perhaps I should acknowledge that there are alternatives to beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past (F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby).

To quote Henry James again, this time from 1882 (Italian Hours), When I hear, when I see, the magical name I have written above these pages [Venice], it is not of the great square that I think, with its strange basilica and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, nor the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St Mark’s.  I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city – a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall.....

Basta.

*****

*****

I wrote another piece about Venice on this blog some fifteen years ago (updated, I think, a year or two after).  If you have the stamina, have a glance:

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2010/04/venezia-venice.html

And then, if you need some light relief, join in with Joe Dolan's audience in this jolly piece of theatre.....

https://youtu.be/p0G9Fq3nsbo?feature=shared

******

{For Sarah H}

*****

Some passing waves

Byron in Italy

 

I wrote this article in 1983, and it was published (in English and Italian) in the second number of the first volume of the Sheraton Italia Magazine, with the following (slightly fanciful) by-line:

English-born Richard Gibbs has been living and working for the past seven years in Rome. He is a professor of English Literature, a free-lance journalist and one of the owners of a new English pub, located on Via della Madonna dei Monti (near Via Cavour) in the historical centre of Rome.

 

I had a particular interest in Noel, George Gordon, 6^th Baron Byron of Rochdale, as in 1980 I had named one of four new Houses at St George’s English School (where I taught) after him.  The then Headmaster, Hendrik Deelman, decreed that, among other criteria, the names (of the houses) should preferably be of people, probably historical figures, with whom pupils will be proud to be associated and about whom much of interest can be said......

 

When I proposed Byron for mine (the others were Drake, Livingstone and Newton) the Headmaster objected and attempted to block my choice.  I insisted, however, on the grounds that despite a physical handicap (he was born with a short Achilles’ tendon which made running difficult) Byron achieved great physical feats in swimming and riding in particular, and not only supported Italian liberty but died assisting the Greeks in their struggle for freedom.  You want a hero?  Find me a better example.....  Hendrik, to his grumpy credit, acquiesced.

 

Here is the article:

Byron in Italy

Portrait of Lord Byron by G Sanders (1807)
Courtesy of Sir Joseph Cheyne
The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome

The literary links between Britain and Italy are many and various and deep-rooted.  Perhaps the earliest connection was Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion, which depicted the Britons in their true-blue glory.  However, it was not until the Middle Ages that the traffic of impressions and influence really began. Whether or not Chaucer met Boccaccio in Florence will never be known.  But the Italian influence on Chaucer was marked.  As ‘Pilgrimage’ became more popular – and safer – and as printing made literature more exchangeable the dissemination of ideas grew.

 

Italy has always been an attractive place of northerners.  The stabilisation of Europe under the Caesars and the popularisation of Greek drama in Latin form must have played many a part as did the immensely important role of Rome in the Christian Church, but not all pilgrims are saints, and many with pious hopes also had pedestrian appetites, and so the dissolution of cultures continued.

 

Civilisation, climate, Christianity and curiosity all played major parts in bringing artists and writers, ladies and gentlemen, to Italy.  From the seventeenth century on, with a snowballing increase in more recent years, the tourist trade has developed, and everyone with his sketch-pad or her note-book, or nowadays with the video-camera [smart-phone? Ed] tries to capture a little of the country for the folks back home.

 

Among the millions of visitors Italy has had have been some of the greatest figures of literature, as well as myriads of their acolytes. Certain of their books are still well-known and a few are still quite readable.  Dickens’ Pictures from Italy ranks high as a subjective piece of journalism, determinedly anti-Catholic and yet refreshingly enthusiastic (his appreciation of the effect of the Trevi Fountain contrasts markedly with his denigration of St Peter’s), while Henry James’ Italian Hours is pompously unapproachable, a weak moment in self-appreciation.

 

Direct responses to the country are less available than the influences to be found in novels and poetry, and drama, however.  Many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in  Italy for example, and the Petrarchan sonnet is a major form in English verse.  The Duchess of Malfi, Keats’s Isabella, Forster’s A Room with a View are three examples of works with obvious connections with Italy, but there are many more.

 

One of the most striking relationships between a British literary figure and the people and literature of Italy is that of Lord Byron.  It is now [November 1983, Ed]. Nearly two hundred years since his birth and short, stormy life, and countless books have been written about him, but there is still a great deal of prejudice in circulation against him and at least as much myth.

 

His great strength was activity: he was not content to stay at home and mop his brow in aesthetic ecstasy.  Byron did things like swim the Hellespont, the Tagus at Lisbon and the Lagoon at Venice.  He travelled extensively in Greece and Albania as a young man, helped the cause of Italian liberation in his maturity, and died at Missolonghi from a fever (doctors reported) contracted during the Greek campaign against the Turks [which he partly financed from his own purse, Ed].

 

A few years ago, in Genova, I was trying to locate the villa in which the Dickens family had lodged for almost a year in the mid-19^th century. I knew roughly where it was and thought I might have found it, though I also knew that it might have disappeared long ago.  Dickens had composed The Chimes, one of his popular Christmas Books, whilst living there, and years later, when he died, the bells of Genova had tolled for him, and the local newspapers had announced that Nostro Caro Carlo Dickens è Morto! I asked in an old, Dickensian haberdasher’s shoop whether the two old ladies (undoubtedly residents of the area since the mid-19^th century!) knew anything about this famous scrittore inglese?  They turned the name over a few times, shaking their wise old heads.  Eventually I got an answer: Charles Dickens – no....  But Byron, yes!  He lived over there.... And indeed, he had lived in that street briefly in 1823, prior to his fatal departure for Greece.

 

Byron holds people’s imaginations because he was generous and vigorous, outspoken and brave.  His life was distressing to himself and to some others but it was presided over by an energetic and essentially truth-loving spirit.  As Peter Quennell (a literary historian famous for his work on Bryon) has said, Three-quarters of Byron’s verse is, at any rate from the modern point of view, quite remarkably bad, yet, as a significant literary figure and as an exceptionally interesting and unusually ill-fated human being, Byron can never cease to command our attention, exhorting our sympathy even at moments when we are inclined to like him least.

 

Although he did not write much about Italy, apart from the famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgimage that describe Venice, Florence and:

 

Oh, Rome! My Country!  City of the Soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

 

much of what he wrote was inspired by what he saw or read here.  Don Juan has precious little to do with Italy (and nothing to do with Mozart’s Don Giovanni) but it is written in a romping ottava rima that he had learnt from reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and it was nearly all written while living in Italy.

 

The prejudice that marks Byron as a licentious libertine, and which brands all romantic poetry as unreadable gush, is one of the main objects of Byron’s satire, and it is most often found in the mouths of those who have never read a line of his.  In fact his work is often witty, readable, and (even) moral, and often contains entertaining thoughts as well as amusing stories, though he never tried to overdo it, as he wrote at the end of the first Canto of Don Juan:

 

But for the present, gentle reader! And

Still gentler purchaser!  The Bard – that’s I –

Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,

And so – ‘your humble servant, and Good-bye!

We meet again, if we should understand

Each other; and if not, I shall not try

Your patience further than this short sample –

‘T’were well if others followed my example.’

 

*****

 

In case you are not persuaded, may I call on Kenneth Clark’s support?  On page 307 of Civilisation, he wrote: appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along, so that he became, after Napoleon, the most famous name in Europe.  From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin, or great men of action like Bismarck, down to the most brainless schoolgirl [careful, Ken!  ED] his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm.....  Byron, who was very much a man of his time, wrote a poem about the opening of a prison – the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon. He begins with a sonnet in the old revolutionary vein – Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeon’s, Liberty!  But when, after many horrors, the prisoner of Chillon is released, a new note is heard:

 

At last men come to set me free;

I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where;

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be,

I learn’d to love despair.

 

Since that line was written how many intellectuals down to Beckett and Sartre have echoed its sentiment.....  [However] this negative conclusion was not the whole of Byron.  The prisoner of Chillon had looked from his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake, and felt himself to be a part of them.  This was the positive side of Byron’s genius, a self-identification with the great forces of nature: not Wordsworth’s daisies and daffodils, but crags, cataracts and colossal storms: in short, with the sublime.....

*****

 

I rest my case.  A final quote from Don Juan, Canto XV, stanza 99 [which, for the record, I read whilst wild camping on Corsica some 45 years ago]:

 

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

‘Twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

 

 

Byron House, 1994

 

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.....