Pt2 - 15:
ROME
Say it.
Rome...
Let it
roll luxuriously off your tongue...
Let it
inhabit your mind...
Rome...
Is there
a more pregnant syllable in the English language?
All that
history, all that drama, all that colour, all that art, all that architecture,
all that plumbing!
I can’t
tell you how excited I was arriving on the night train from Bari back in 1977,
and you may sense my excitement now as our 747-400 descended smoothly over
green fields, flaps trimmed on final approach to Fiumicino. We gained an hour
on the crossing in the first time zone adjustment since we landed in Cairo and,
given all the places we’ve been and all the things we’ve seen over the last
three months, I had to let that sink in. So it was only just after 8 when our
wheels chirped on the runway and we taxied to the air bridge. Instead of the
two hundred meter tarmac bus ride we’ve become used to we decanted straight
into the state of the art terminal, technically the Leonardo da Vinci
International Airport. Movement from baggage claim to passport control, where I
actually had to request a stamp, and on through customs was seamless and we
emerged into the arrival area to find all the information and exchange
facilities at our fingertips. Here was an airport designed by grown-ups. Within
minutes we were armed with wads of lira, a detailed map of the city and a list
of accommodation options. I rang the 3-star Pension Joli on Via Cola di Rienzo and
in the first test of my halting Italian booked us in for three nights. So far,
tutto bene.
The Joli
occupied several floors at number 243 V. Cola di Reinzo. We squeezed into the
tiny lift with our gear like a pair of elephants into a matchbox and emerged at
reception on the 6th floor. Room 50, all venerable wood panelling
and fittings hinting at grander days, was comfortable and convenient and boasted
a view of the dome of St Peter’s off to the right. This is old Europe. We
dropped our packs and hit the streets.
It was
warm and humid so we conserved our energy and soaked up the atmosphere on the
short walk to the metro at Ottaviano where we jumped the train for Spagna, the
closest station to the Spanish Steps. This being Rome these are no ordinary
steps, they are architecture. It took two centuries of argy bargy before
everybody who was anybody in the game finally agreed on how to link the
Renaissance Trinitá dei Monti Church on the higher level
with what was then the Holy See at the bottom. When they were constructed in
the 1720s the church was under the patronage of the Spanish Embassy, thus the
name. These days there are more bums on the steps than boots; it’s the place to
meet, loll around, be seen. We dutifully lolled for a while, allowed ourselves
to be seen, then wandered off down towards the Trevi Fountain.
The
streets were lined with chic boutiques, small bars, smart ristorantes and busy cafès. Every so often we emerged into a cobbled piazza where the
traffic circled around a baroque centrepiece. The locals were all impeccably
dressed, so impossibly elegant. It was all so suddenly, so utterly, so quintessentially
European it hurt…unless that was the lingering McSquits. It would be another 24
hours before I was confident enough to get more than fifty meters from a dunny.
The
Trevi is not just any old fountain, it’s a superstar fountain. You’ve seen it
in a dozen classic films and on a million postcards so you know what you’re
going to get, but it’s still a revelation when you round that last corner and
there it actually is. What it is
today is only the most recent expression of a monument going back to
pre-Imperial Rome, when the spot on which it stands marked the junction of
three arterial aquaducts, a trivium. I
like to think of the Trevi as the ultimate celebration of Roman plumbing and, like
hanging out on the Spanish Steps, there is also a grand Trevi tradition. To
make it happen I left Tess to enjoy the view and went off to the nearest gelateria.
I loaded up with a couple of cinque gustis (chinkway goostis) - enormous five-flavoured confections
- and made it back just before they began to melt. We sat contented in the cool
of the forecourt gazing at the fountain and, calmed by the gentle sound, leisurely
licked them away.
It’s pointless
listing every monument, every landmark, every historical building, every
church, every piece of Baroque art you pass on even a short stroll around the
Eternal City, so I will. As we made our winding way down to the Colosseum we
passed the palace and stables of Quirinale, the Montecavallo Gardens, the
Colonna Gallery, Trajan’s Column, the Roman Forum and the Basilica di
Massenzio. Time is easy to lose in this timeless city and we’d completely lost
track of it when we finally emerged under the Arch of Constantine to behold the
great amphitheatre. On the sidewalks actors dressed as legionaries hammed it up
for the tourists and posed for last pics before clocking off in a few minutes.
*
On the subject of the legions, here’s a few random nerdy factoids:
- A
legion consisted of 4,800 men divided
into 100 cohorts of 480 men subdivided
into 6 centuries of 80 soldiers, each
commanded by a centurion
- The
Stentor had the loudest voice; it’s where we get the adjective stentorian. He relayed orders down the
line
- A
left-handed legionary was a sinistra,from where we get sinister. When
the soldiers assumed a battle formation like the Testudo, or tortoise, arranging their shields to form cover on the top,
front and sides of the squad, the sinistra had to be at the very edge of the
formation or he’d create a hole in the “shell”
- The
letters SPQR on the legion’s battle
standard represented the Latin Senatus
Populus que Romanus, The Senate and People of Rome
- All
legions marched under the crest of the Golden Eagle. In the long history of
Roman warfare only one Eagle was ever lost in battle: The Eagle of Varus
- To
be decimated is to lose just one tenth of
your force, not wiped out.
*
I was
all prepared to be turned away but happily the lovely lady at the entrance hit
us with a freebie, we had thirty minutes to see what we could. And, since we
had the place virtually to ourselves, we could see a lot. Even when it’s
crawling with tourists you’d have to be comatose to enter the Colosseum without
a frisson of excitement, without succumbing to the fantasy of time travel. Unlike
the Acropolis, say, you leave the modern world behind when you enter the closed
environment of the Colosseum; you’re enfolded and contained in its dramatic
narrative. The Colosseum is the only free-standing amphitheatre ever built by
the Romans – that is, it isn’t cut into a hillside –and in many ways represents
the pinnacle of Roman engineering excellence. I could flood these pages with
the long list of extraordinary innovations in its construction, innovations not just years ahead of their time but centuries, and the epic
statistics which easily qualify it as one of the true architectural Wonders of
the World, but you can look them up if you’re really interested. While you’re
here though, find a quiet place and close your eyes; hear the crowds baying for
gladiatorial blood, watch as extravagant spectacles unfold in your mind’s eye. It’s
tempting to imagine the mad Caligula dropping the imperial hanky to start a
mock sea battle, with the arena filled with water and replica ships joining in
combat. But you’d be wrong: Caligula was forty years murdered before work began
on the Colosseum and it’s logistically questionable whether mock sea battles
ever actually took place here. But a lot of other extremely colourful and gory
things did happen within these soaring walls; mock hunts of exotic creatures
imported from all corners of the Empire, dramatic recreations of mythological
stories, ritual executions in which the condemned were thrown into the arena
naked and unarmed to be ripped apart by wild beasts. A vast army of
technicians, stage designers, actors, musicians, writers, theatrical directors,
animal handlers, gladiators and their trainers and every kind of tradesman you can conjure
kept the entertainments coming for more than five hundred years.
And
before we knew it our thirty golden minutes were up.
Considering
that this morning we were regarding the Parthenon from our room in Athens we
figured we’d travelled enough centuries for one day and retired to the Joli for
dinner, drinks and dreams.
*
There is
only one word for the wealth of art contained in the Vatican Museums: Obscene.
Given that’s pretty much my opinion of the entire religious institution you
might expect that, on principle, I’d avoid the place like the tax office, but
it’s a core principle of mine that the appreciation of art should never be
impeded by my few remaining principles. And so I found myself lining up with
every other tourist in Rome for a day in the galleries. Like the futility of
listing every monument, landmark, historical building and Baroque sculpture you
pass on the street it’s ridiculous to think you can list every priceless artwork
in the Vatican, even that small fraction you manage to see on the average
visit. Everything is an artwork; the
double helix staircase is an artwork, every wall panel is an artwork, the
ceilings are artworks, every window is an artwork, the doorknobs are artwork.
The
galleries unfold one after the other: the statuary, the tapestries, the rare
books, the ancient maps. A pageant of the ecstatic, the aesthetic, the
allegorical, the intellectual, the metaphysical; anthems in marble, in oils, in
embroidery, in gold. And at the centre of it all the ultimate hymn to the High
Renaissance: the Capella Sistina. Photography is expressly forbidden in the controlled
gloom of the sacred chapel, so flash bulbs popped everywhere like small arms fire on
a moonless night. All the exasperated attendants could do was shush the rising crescendo of
awed murmuring when it became too loud. Off to the left conservators worked
silently on a tall scaffolding concealed behind long hessian curtains. You
could plainly see where they’d already been; the difference between the
begrimed unrestored panels and the vibrant colours of the cleaned work was
stark. I discretely videoed Michelangelo’s ceiling.
Finally,
the Pinacoteca. At the far end of the ornate gallery hangs Raphael’s vast Transfiguration. At more than four
meters tall and nearly three meters wide you have to stand well back, like
fifteen to twenty meters back, to take it all in. Needless to say, I’m less
interested in the subjects of religious art than in the intersection of aesthetics,
control of compositional variables and artistic technique. And as much as I
hate to admit it, religious passion has inspired some of the most poignant art
ever produced. I don’t pretend to be an art critic either, but even an dedicated heathen like me can appreciate the beauty and power of the Pieta.
The Transfiguration is a work of halves. The top shows christ ascending amid all the conventional iconography – holy light, radiant clouds, flowing white robes, figures whom I suppose are apostles gazing in rapture at the divine transformation, you can hear the violins. The bottom half is the more interesting for mine. It depicts the attempted exorcism of a possessed child, right, who commands the attention of a small crowd. Each figure is exquisitely realised, their expressions alone defining both their character and their engagement within the dynamic of the scene. What draws me in to the lower half most of all is Raphael’s command of light and shade, especially the power of shadow to articulate depth and emphasise detail. It is a painting in its own right and must surely have inspired Caravaggio, the master of chiaroscuro.
*
Which
seques neatly into the following day when we visited the National Gallery of
Art Antica in the Barberini. The Barberini was a surprise on two fronts. Firstly,
although it was in the throes of restoration the galleries had been allowed to
fall into deep disrepair and reeked of neglect. The staff were bored and
unhappy, the Raphaels badly hung and the labelling all in Italian. Secondly,
and more happily, the upper galleries contained a couple of unheralded masterpieces,
including Caravaggio’s Judith and
Holofernes and Narcissus, and Hans
Holbein’s original Henry VIII. The
pictures were all poorly lit and those facing the windows could only be admired
from an oblique angle. I signed the visitor’s book with a couple of rank
McFarts.
We
ambled our way back to the Joli via Augustus’s Mausoleum, a stroll along the
Tiber and across the Ponte Sant’ Angelo in front of the Castel of the same name
(which is actually the Emperor Hadrian’s Mausoleum). You can’t escape the two
most surreal juxtapositions in Rome; the composure and grandeur of the ancient
against the chaos and impermanence of the modern, and the beggars outside the
Vatican. And I’ll just park those observations there…
Speaking
of parking: Repeat a truth often enough and it becomes a cliché, and all the clichés
about Roman drivers are true. They’re not murderous like Cairenes, just
predictable in their unpredictability. While they’ll pause at pedestrian
crossings they won’t wait till you’ve reached the opposite kerb before they
scream off. And you gotta smile at their parking habits, basically they park wherever
and however they can fit their little Fiat Bambinos – up on the footpath, nose
first in between two cars parked parallel…you get the picture. I half expected to see a Fiat on a second floor balcony.
From the
Castel Sant’ Angelo we swerved across to St Peter’s, hoping to find it a bit
less crowded in the cool of late afternoon. And it was, though every time we
paused to rest our weary feet we were hurried on by self-important little men
whose job it obviously wasn’t to offer succour and comfort to the tired and
hungry. Approaching sundown we found a basement restaurant called Zi Gaetano
which offered a menu touristica of hearty vegetable broth, roast meat with salad and chips, a crème caramel
for desert and bottle of house red for L25,000 each (A$20). We could have happily
settled in but the peace and quiet was destroyed by a sudden infestation of loud American tourists, and when a trio
featuring guitar, accordion and tambourine launched into Volare we left. Probably a good thing, for tomorrow it’s Arrivederci Roma.
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