Roma - Back in the glue pot again!

Towers of Silence.....

I am watching Trust, a sprawling dramatisation of the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III in 1973.  It takes me back, sort of, to Rome in the 70s.  Getty was expelled from St George's English School a little before I taught there, and the whole affair was over a couple of years before I arrived.... but I claim a remote connection, and, in the midst of the herds of tourists on my recent visit, I feel a sense of belonging.... 

{er...To the city, not the tourists, y'unnerstan?} 

This was my street, in Trastevere, where I lived on the second floor of 169 Via di San Francesco a Ripa....

They were exciting times, for many reasons.  Kidnapping was one thing.....  The deaths of three of my transvestite neighbours, found shot and dumped on the periphery of the city after some drug deals went wrong, added to the spice of life.....  In the Caffè di Marzio, in Piazza Santa Maria di Trastevere, a hundred metres from our door, my flatmate was stabbed in the stomach, in exactly the spot from which I took this photograph....

Unsurprisingly, things have transmuted. Trastevere is now trendy, in a Montmartyrdom sort of way, with lots of bright young things and laughter and spritzers and chips....  Despite defacement, the sign on this Caffè hasn't changed....

But its interior and nature has....  You would never have got a beer here in the seventies.  It was coffee or milk, and a digestivo, and that was about it.

But not everything e cambiato.  Santa Cecilia still rests her marble head under the altar in her church....

And round the corner the finest fifteenth century cloister in Rome, if not the world, that of the Pia Società di S. Giovanni dei Genovesi, is still fairly difficult to access....

But despite the trends some of the narrow lanes and alleys in this part of town, where Genoese sailors stopped over while their ships were unloaded on the Ripa Grande, are still quiet and atmospheric....

And some, at least, of the restaurants maintain the post war charm that Fellini and co - and Peck and Hepburn - celebrated.... 

Across the river, in Roma propria, between Largo Argentina and Piazza Paganica, I pause at the doorway of via Sant'Elena, 8, known to have been home to one of the covi (hideouts) of the Brigate Rosse in the '70s,  possibly even the place in which Aldo Moro passed his last hours on the night of May 8th/9th 1978, and where he was shot in the back seat of the red Renault 4, in the garage of what now claims to be a fish shop.

I look up at the shuttered windows, not unlike my own flat across the river, and wonder what secrets they could tell....

And I look round the back, at the dingy, narrow Vicolo dei Falegnami, down which Moro may have been hustled and into the back door of via Sant'Elena, 8,

Before being killed, stuffed into the boot, and driven to be 'discovered' in Via Caetani, right outside one of the stations of the Fiamme Gialle, the Guardia di Finanza, Cossiga's Teste di Cuoio, a branch of Italian Military Police whose role, amongst others, is to be anti-terrorist.  They also have a pleasant beach resort at Fregene, where Aldo Moro is thought to have been held for a while before being brought into the city to be murdered..... from where he got sand in his trouser turn ups.....

Beware of the Griffons, I say!

Yes, Rome is full of secrets.  Mutterings in huddles of bandsmen,  

Quiet phone calls from men in suits,

Whispers in the darkness of churches,

Or painful sighs behind closed blinds in secret service offices,

Rome has always been like this.  In the middle ages, powerful families sealed themselves inside towers like this, La Torre dei Capocci,

Or like this one, the Torre dei Conti, built at the beginning of the thirteenth century by Pope Innocent III, mentioned by Petrarch, and then partially destroyed in the earthquake of 1348....

Then there's the granddaddy of them all, the massive Torre delle Milizie, also from the thirteenth century, but leaning perilously above the ruins of Trajan's Forum, and reputedly the site where Nero fiddled when Rome burned....

Towers of silence.  As Dylan sang, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble, ancient footprints are everywhere....

But light still shines on the tourists in the city, mostly happy and oblivious to the darker side of history.  They take their selfies by the Fontana di Trevi,

Relax awhile in the Piazza di Spagna,  where Little Pauly dances alone in Danny Boyle's Trust.  Climb the steps to the church of Trinità dei Monti (hard by the Hassler Hotel where Tony Soprano ate his last pound of Foie Gras)....

Gape at the columns and the ruins of the Imperial Forum,

And wander aimlessly on the unnaturally white Carrara marble of the Wedding Cake, the Altare della Patria, in saluting distance of Mussolini's office in the Palazzo Venezia....

Me, I'll sip a beer and read my book, 

And peer down at the dark street below, secretly wishing it were yesterday,

Then in the morning,

Is that really the time?

I must pick up my bed,

And walk....

And get back to sniffing at secrets in this dog-forsaken city....

And, trust me, a dog will have its day,

Or maybe it is the wolf, the wolf that suckled Rome and made it what it is....

Free to Roam

(You are, secretly, being watched)

Trust me....

Central Italy - Tuscia - The land that time forgot

Italian shadows

The car falters, and stops.  We are in the middle of Tuscia, the ancient land of the Etruscans, in central Italy.  Sometimes also called Etruria, this area covers much of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany, and is littered with broken down relics - tombs, temples, towns, and, as here, modes of transport.....

It is a wild and unkempt area, cut by deep wooded valleys, and undulating with unpopulated hills.

Villages, like Blera, rise up on spurs, growing out of the living rock, carved like cheese,

Towns like these are still sleepy places, with shaded narrow streets where groups of elderly inhabitants wait for the time to pass.

Symbolically, the local butcher advertises snails for sale at €9 a kilo....

Nearby, the town of Barbarano Romano is in costume.  

A friend of mine, who used to run a simple trattoria here, carries the banner of the Confraternita della Morte.....

While young women dress as noblewomen:

Young men proudly beat the drum:

And the town band plays on:

In these valleys, overgrown and neglected, lie the empty tombs of Etruscans, who ranged across this area two thousand years ago, or more.  Typically they carved tombs out of the volcanic tufo (tuff) in necropolises across life-giving rivers from the towns of the living,

Though sometimes they constructed elaborate tombs from blocks and then mounded earth over them,

The vast majority of these were looted ages ago, or spoiled by being opened and trashed, though some, such as those at Tarquinia, at least kept their painted walls intact, and others revealed their secrets to archaeologists rather than grave-robbers.  The city of Vulci, with its walls and gates, remains an evocative place to visit, though much of what you see now dates from Roman times after the empire imposed defeat in 280 BC,

But what remains is preserved by grazing aurochs....

Today Vulci is a well-cured park with its own natural swimming pool, the Laghetto del Pellicone, surrounded by cliffs in the valley of the river Fiora....

But for centuries malaria crippled this area, and early visitors, such as George Dennis in the 1840s, chronicled the desolation: the wide, wide moor, a drear and melancholy waste, stretches around you, no human being seen on its expanse.... The Fiora frets in its rocky bed far beneath your feet, and its murmurs conveyed to you by the tall cliffs you stand on, are the sole disturbers of the solemn stillness.....

D H Lawrence, some eighty years later, also found the place dispiriting: the country was all empty and abandoned-seeming, yet with that peculiar, almost ominous, poignancy of places where life has once been intense.....

We make our way over the empty landscape, eventually to Tuscania, whose walls and churches indicate a rich past.  The magnificent Lombard-Romanesque church of San Pietro stands aloof outside the town, flanked by two imposing medieval military towers.  

Inside the church, beyond a line of Etruscan sarcophagi, steps rise up to the apse, or down to the crypt.  It is solemn, quiet, and bare.  Centuries could pass in moments here....

We move on, beyond Viterbo, to Bomarzo which  George Dennis described as, a village of considerable size situated on a wooded cliff-bound platform, with an old castle at the verge of the precipice.  It commands a glorious view of the vale of the Tiber, and the long chain of Umbrian and Sabine Apennines to the east; of the vast Etruscan plain to the north, with Monte Fiascone like a watch-tower in the midst, and the giant masses of Monte Cetona and Monte Amiata in the far horizon..... All is not so wonderful, however.  He goes on, like most villages in the Papal State, Bomarzo is squalid in the extreme.....

But we are not here to seek accommodation.  Bomarzo has an unusual claim to fame.  Below the town, in the Bosco Sacro, is the Parco dei Mostri, which was created in the second half of the sixteenth century by the slightly bonkers local nobleman, Vicino Orsini.....  Vast figures, grotesque masks, a temple, a most disconcerting sloping house, and giant sculpted creatures have been created out of the natural rocks, and surprise you amongst the woods....

Across the Tiber valley we spend a night at the Abbazia di Farfa, once one of the most powerful Benedictine Abbeys in Italy, with over five hundred monks and an adjoining village to support it.  Now, though it still houses an important library, it is served by five monks....

But we are well looked after by the Suore di Santa Brigida, aka the Hot Cross Nuns (due to the crosses on their headdresses).  There is something medieval about the experience, though maybe that's due to the wine?

In the morning we backtrack to Torrita Tiberina to pay our respects to another shade of the Italian past, Aldo Moro.

Though this distinguished politician was originally from Puglia, he and his family loved to spend time here in their villa.

After his kidnapping and murder in 1978, his private funeral (he left strict instructions that no politicians nor dignitaries should attend the service) was carried out here and he lies at rest in a simple tomb overlooking the river valley and the hills of central Italy.

Rolling back across Tuscia, we come across a strange, possibly sinister, coincidence.  In the village of Canale Monterano, my attention is caught by an ancient Fiat Cinquecento, the number plate of which bears a close resemblance to that  of the Red Renault 4 in which the cadaver of Aldo Moro had been left in 1978.....

The Renault that was left in Via Caetani in the capital was (falsely) plated Roma N5 7686 in a very similar configuration.....  Traces of sand and soil on the tyres of the car, and on Moro's shoes, were found to match the volcanic ground in neighbouring Manziana, where another Fiat, belonging to Mario Moretti, the head of the Brigate Rosse who kidnapped Moro, had been seen at a villa earlier in 1978.

But that's another story....

On the way, we pass through Vejano, dominated by a grim castle, also property of the Orsini family.  There is an imposing town hall, which bears the motto, Labor Omnia Vincit Improbus (1959), which was once a popular injunction, adapted from Virgil, and meaning Hard Work Overcomes Everything.....

Well, perhaps not everything, as a bas relief on a nearby wall witnesses, calling up other shades of this part of Italy:  In Memory of the Killling of Mariano and Orsio Nobili, Victims of Nazi Ferocity, 7 June 1944....

We return to Lake Bracciano, Lacus Sabatinus, and visit the Odescalchi (originally Orsini, again) castle that overlooks the lake, gazing back at Trevignano Romano, where we used to live, amongst the remains of Etruscan tombs and medieval towers....

And in the woods, after all the rain this year, the cyclamen are flourishing, nourished by all that history.....

While monsters relax in the shades of Tuscia.....

With fond memories of many great times at La Pacchiona, Barberano Romano....