ROME IV

March 9, 2011

Walked longer today than yesterday, though perhaps not quite so far. When I start out I’m running in front of traffic like un cerva; by the end I’m shuffling like una taratuga. I’m full of animal names because I went to the sad little Roman zoo. Climbed from the Piazza di Popolo up into the Borghese Gardens, which are vast, Central Park vast. Cherries are in bloom there. I would have lingered and tasted more, but I was anxious to find my way around. Stopped at the Museo Pietro Canonica, in a house the Commune gave Canonica because of his fame and excellence as a sculptor. I’d never heard of him, but his execution was quite good, quite individual. His subject matter was historical, heroic, as dramatic as one can get without crossing into the histrionic. The pieces which were not historical seemed to have been portraits of aristocrats, czars and grand dukes and popes and infant barone. It made him look like an artistic social climber, but he might have been hugely popular, and all that commissioned. His garden gleamed with orange trees, with a well brimming clear water. I’d been aiming all the while for the Borghese Gallerie, but when I arrived, though it was barely noon, it was “sold out.” How does a museum get to be “sold out”? So I bought a ticket for domani il nonno, an absurd time to be looking at art. Thwarted by culture, I hiked on to the zoo. While the Gallery was full to overflowing, the zoo was almost mine alone, an interesting state of affairs. The names of animals are easy to remember, so I hope to encounter more discussions of zoology. Three or four of us were treated to a domestic moment when the lioness nuzzled the lion, and he groomed her for a while, and they snuggled, and then he walked away, finished with that long before she was. The tiger, in plain sight, did not deign to move. The oranutans were holding hands. There in an aquarium coiled the adder which bit Eurydice. Dragged my exhausted carcass past the Belvedere to the Piazza di Spana and the Spanish Steps. I had some refreshments– an elegant, pricey daiquiri–at the top, and then plunged down among the thousand or so kids who played on all the steps. It was quite lovely, and made me wish I’d found the spot forty years before. I was looking for the Keats house, and found it. The girl who sells the tickets is from New York, and told me she had studied Italian for four years before she came here, and still couldn’t understand a thing when they began to talk. I felt better. Her boyfriend is from Limerick, and we shared our affection for the rough, very-unlike-Rome little town. Keats’ last home is a little pale blue room, long and narrow, with a very high ceiling. It has a window open directly onto the steps, and I know the sounds of the piazza delighted Keats as long as he could be delighted by anything. Looking at the tiny bed in the tiny corner– I wept. I wept still in the street making for my hotel. I thought all the ridiculous things you think– maybe I could have comforted him, brought him a whole chicken, smuggled tetramiacin in from the XXth century, held him when Severn was weary. Anything. The other literary place which moved me like that is Yeats’ tomb in Drumcliff.

The trees I misindentified as date palms are Canary palms. There are wild parakeets in the Borghese, zipping by in a flash of emerald.

But, where do the Romans buy groceries?