ROME III

March 8, 2011

Twelve hours ago I began tramping around Rome. I come to rest now with boards for legs and stone for a back.

Found a bar last night only one door down. Who should be in it but an elderly couple from Fermanagh, who said they were not enjoying Rome very much, as there is nothing to do. I do understand what they mean. If you’re used to a bar as a center of social life, you’re thrown, for there aren’t that many. Today I found two more, which I may get to yet tonight. They’re both Irish. One is called The Abbey Theater. There are, however, plenty of restaurants; the Irish (or American) idea of drinking without eating is just plain odd to the Romans. As this is Shrove Tuesday, I sat me down to a regular Italian lunch at Re Papa’s in Trastevere. It nearly killed me. It’s as mortal as an Irish breakfast. Still rifting up the remnants. Delicious as sin, though

Set out in the morning light across the Castle footbridge, following a path Simon had laid out for me the day before. The sun was so brilliant and low I could see nothing so long as I was headed east or south–which was most of the time–but a white glare as comforting to the touch as it was blinding to the eye. The Piazza Novollo lay white and sunstruck between its glowing buildings. In the center a Ramesean obelisk floats on a cloud of Baroque river gods. On the south end was a little square stage and a punch-and-judy cart, probably waiting for tonight. On the north end, a fountain where a studly bearded dude is locked in mortal combat with an octopus. I wanted to sit and write there– I did a little–but the Pantheon lay nearby, and it was calling my name.

The Pantheon, now called St. Mary and the Martyrs, springs up out of an ordinary piazza with no fanfare whatever. One might miss it if one didn’t look in the right direction at the right moment. Is it the most famous building in the world? The Parthenon and the Taj Mahal might ace it, but not that many more. It deserves whatever praise, for it is suave and essential, and only a precise combination of efficiency and vision–the kind that, in a different mood, builds durable empires–could conceive it. On the inside it looks like it was finished yesterday. Flashbulbs flashed beside the signs that said, “No photography.” A bunch of Japanese kids set a camera on the drain and then circled around, so the camera would snap them in the dead center of the structure, heads framed by the sky blue oculus. The oculus threw a blinding oval on the north wall. I must say that the imposed Christian iconography is alone loathsome, presumptuous, infantile. It’s like a dog pissing on a statue and thinking it owns it. I suppose if that was what was necessary to preserve the masterwork through troubled times, then so be it. I remember in the Sistine Chapel an attendant rushing in and shushing everybody, trying to restore the illusion that it is still a place of worship. The Catholic Church has always tried to have it both ways, to be removed and holy and at the same time a profit-taking power of the world. That might be the center of its absurdity. I have never hated the Church Political more than now I’m in the capital of it.

The Trevi Fountain was my next stop. The playfulness which I find throughout the monuments of Rome is nowhere plainer than here. It was surrounded by laughing children and–for some reason–soldiers. Two gulls perched on the fountain, looking at us as we at them, every now and then squawking something to one another which must surely have been a comment on somebody in the Fellini-esque crowd.

Walked to the Colosseum through the ruins of the Forum. It must have been beautiful then, for it’s beautiful now as a few columns and tortured brick walls softened by pines. Roman building practices are so like ours that the ruins do not give off an air of antiquity, but rather of a bombed city just now being restored. All the African boys were selling tiny model tripods. I have no idea what that was about. They must have been illegal, for they all swept up their goods and pretended to be walking idly along when the polizia drove by. Simon warned me don’t bother to go into the Colosseum, so I didn’t–however doggedly I was harassed by the tour salesmen–but I could see enough inside to appreciate how gigantic it was. Still, however, without feeling oversized or looming. The only building in Rome which looms inhumanly is the nearby, snow-blind white Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the gawky giant-child of the whole city. Did the fascists build it? I think they must.

Beautiful shade and suave ruins of the Palatine Hill, the source of the word “palace,” so the tour guide said.

Spring flowers in the grass of the Circus Maximus.

Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the oldest building in Rome, looking very Greek. A man was peeing on it.

I did–again–as Simon suggested, and crossed the Tiber into Trastevere. In some ways, though lacking famous monuments, this quarter is the best yet. It is a keenly liveable and heavily lived-in place, with chaotic brick streets and the most elegant vernacular architecture in the world. Everywhere you looked was something– I hate to use the word–picturesque, a crooked street with laundry flapping from the windows, an angle of walls, a flower pot sitting just so in a patch of Roman dirt. I longed for my paint and bushes. It was the end of the day and I was shivering with exhaustion, but I lingered and lingered. Found what is to this point my favorite church in Rome: Basilica de Santa Maria in Trastevere, a Romanesque jewel-box, creepy and holy and dark, the way an ancient church should be. The faux beggar at the door said, “The Virgin Mary watches you.” My Italian isn’t quick enough to reply, “And you too.” Roman beggars– most of whom are pros and therefore frauds-- genuflect in the street, face down, like slaves before pharaoh on the old movies.

Took advantage of information on a poster and went, finally, to a concert at the Chiesa Valdese, not far from my hotel. The title was: Festino nella sera del giovedi grasso avanti cena di Adriano Banchieri (1567-1634). I didn’t know Banchieri, but some of the music was familiar. Maybe Praetorius used it. It was less a concert than a masque in honor of Carnevale, and very charming. The homey chaos in the church before it started– performers and audience chatting, costumes being donned, all sorts of “unprofessional” behavior– led to me to expect less than I got. It was rambunctious and playful and yet musically tight. The performers were people to whom music came easily, so they could afford not to be so serious about it. The main tenor was crystalline and perfect. A good actor, too. It was quite wonderful, a Renaissance romp in the place which, after Florence, invented it all. The old woman who sat next to me spent the half hour before the concert throwing her coat up against me, saving the row for her family, incidentally expressing her vexation that I had been there before she could claim it all. Her daughter would move the coat, asking her mother what if I had a friend coming, but when her back was turned, nona threw the coat against me again. Naturally she chattered through the performance, twisting around in her seat, fixated on her granddaughter, patting everyone on the shoulder so they could see what cute thing the granddaughter was doing at the moment. My Italian was not up to either “stop being a schoolgirl and pay attention to the concert” or “if you want to watch your granddaughter, why don’t you stay home and do it?” I did have the revenge of making her chatter to me a long time before saying, “No parlo Italiano.”

Which, at this time, is only 99.5% true.