Rome

Rome

We are approaching Rome. The sky is clearing kilometer by kilometer. The train enters a periodic tunnel and emerges to even brighter sun. For the first time since the boat in Venice I think of sunglasses. Rolling hills, small, with villas (many quite new) and patchworks of farmland and trees, precise on the earth. The trees have no leaves, but every field is covered in grass and the grass is extremely green, the herald of spring just two months away. Sheep. More tunnels. A man across from me who may be Austrian reading a novel by John Irving. Trains pass on the opposite track with a slightly frightening whoosh.

Dream

I arrived in Rome and had an extraordinary evening. Scenes from the history of the Roman Empire intermixed with the global marketplace; a Bengalese operating a Laundromat and internet café, computers beside the clothes-driers. The machine I used had an ancient keyboard. The decals of the popular letters like “e” and “s” were worn away and except for the period, none of the punctuation keys worked. I sent messages with contracted words lacking apostrophes. I could put nothing in parenthesis. No dash.

I took the A metro line to the Ottaviano stop. The A line is symbolized on maps with the color red and in reality covered with graffiti. St. Peter’s Square at night is bathed under the same orange glow streetlights the world over emit, a gaseous light only a mole or primitive fish would enjoy. My walk in earnest began there. The map made a certain route look obvious. People and eventually buildings thinned so that I was alone, a kind of ignorant gladiator, walking headlong into one-way traffic on a street without a sidewalk, surrounded on each side by walls.

Some police in Rome wear blue capes and look Napoleonic. The two who saw me emerge from Viale della Mura Aurelie did not question, arrest or assist me. As a phantom, I went on to discover fountains and then more columns. Everything is close and far away at the same time. I ate a dinner of sliced ham and pasta con fungi porcine with Australians at the table beside me. The River. I crossed it three times and doubled back twice. Cardboard plaques gave the history of each bridge. Someone had punched the middle out of the one describing Ponte Sisto. The subway had already closed but I didn’t know that. Once again there was no one else but me.

Later, when I slept, the men dressed in Roman Legion outfits with rubber swords made Rome and its history very real and I could hear the original soldiers shouting, their shields clanking together. A map near the Coluseum shows the empire encircling the entire Mediterranean Sea. CE 117. But I still had to figure out which direction to go along the Tiber. You just surrender to the scenery of a walk. Rome has seven hills. The Termini is that way. The ruin of the Forum is closed at night but you can get up close to it. Peer into it. Young couples wrapped in each other lounging on a wall, looking down at the Arch of Septimus Severus. Columns still stand. There is no other way to say it. My hotel is still twenty blocks away. This will never repeat itself.

A Message of Love

My lessons in history began to accelerate. It was just before noon. This walk started with the baths of Diocletian and ended in a room where Keats wrote his last poem. Except to hold a pendulum over the map of central Rome and follow its suggestion route during my walk, I planned nothing.

Kristine said that clothing stores near the Spanish Steps were like museums. Bruno Magli. Selling only purses and shoes. I could see a red leather grip displayed in an alcove and covered with glass, as if Raphael had made it. An extreme minimalism. So little merchandise the store looked like it had gone out of business. I measured the room where Keats died of tuberculosis. It was only four inches wider than the spread of my arms. In 1824, Keats would look out a window and see the building now renting to Bruno Magli. The bed he slept in is part of the Keats and Shelly Memorial House. You could easily miss it.

Rome is either piled up or strewn about or both. Petrarch said, “Nowhere is Rome less well known than in Rome.” I saw snippings from the head of Keats as well as Mary Shelly. Finding out it was customary to send a lock of hair as a token of friendship in 19th Century Europe inspired me.

The Pantheon. Now wedged between hotels and narrow streets, Hadrian said his intention was, “This sanctuary of All Gods should reproduce the likeness of the terrestrial globe and the stellar sphere.” The doors are original and I walked through them with my breath slightly held. I had to stare strait up to see the circle of perfect sky. The geometry of the ceiling still does not explain why it doesn’t collapse. I tried to imagine it before a Pope stripped it of its bronze, that color against the blue. The marble used in the columns (entirely excavated long ago) was warm, almost the color of cedar. Even the floor was stunning. Outside I tried to photograph a pigeon perched on the head of a statue but it flew. Instead of sitting down to eat I bought pizza wrapped in paper and just kept walking.

Via del Corse has always been famous for its crowds but of course I didn’t know that. There are antique shops selling gold mirrors so baroque the ornamental leaves decorating them look like nightmares of genetic engineering. The Spanish Steps were brilliantly sunlit. Not as steep or as long as the ones leading to the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and covered with people. The naives of the Basilica where formed of columns taken from pagan temples. More marble the color of wood (I touched my hand to each of them). I sat before another Black Madonna. No one else in the church. I’m only mentioning that Michelangelo designed the Cathedral build inside Diocletian’s baths or that I looked up at its ceiling.

At the top of the Spanish Steps there was a huge billboard. A photograph of Gandhi and beside it his quote, “If you want to give a message it must be a message of love.”

Wardrobe

Hotel Cervia. Room number four has the simplicity I like. How many times have I moved a hotel table over to a window? Which is where the radiators are. This room looks out at a sinister streetlight. Fortunately I can close the shutters at night and hide from it. The room is narrow and the ceiling is far out of reach, fifteen feet above me. Isn’t this shape good for dreams? I haven’t gotten tired of rotating between the four shirts I packed. As far as books, I’m only reading one of the three I brought. With two pair of identical black pants I’ve reduced the lower half of my wardrobe to a uniform. Often the contents of my two small bags seem much more than I need.

Colors

An even cloudier day spent mostly with paintings. I did not see or enter a church. At one point I remembered the song Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones, from the first album I ever purchased. Like someone who drinks the tiny cups of espresso served here and confines his sips of coffee to three, I spent most of my time with three paintings, which instructed me in the color black. Even in the darkness of a cave our neurons and mind are inventing color. Black even more than white is an abstraction. Whereas the black in a small portrait by Antonella de Messina combines something of the lacquer on a grand piano with the experience of making love in pitch darkness. The masterpiece depicts a man with a black hat, a kind of head-scarf, against a black background. In room #5 of the National Museum of Rome there is a statue of Aphrodite. A tour guide had just commented on it, like describing the ingredients of a recipe for tuna casserole. Instead, think of the whiteness of the marble depicting Aphrodite condensed into the thin layer of oil paint in the scarf of the man Messina painted in 1474. The black was that beautiful. To say you cannot appreciate it from a postcard is like saying a statue is not alive. Only from thirteen inches away can the human eye grasp what Messina did with paint. The basement of the National Museum has a collection of ancient coins, many of them gold. Inside the cases a motorized magnifying glass operated by buttons can be moved over an individual coin. It is ironic, not only that money would be the only thing in a museum one is offered a magnifying glass to see, but also the fact that all of the machines were broken.

Feral

The magpies here are bigger than the ones we know and brown where ours are white. They’re more cautious, more to themselves, gathering on the edges beyond where the pigeons feed. Cappuccino is considered a breakfast coffee, though frivolous, something the tourists drink. Whatever the time of day, the real drink is café. In two syllables you stand at the bar and say it, café. The bartender replies, café. He slams the strainer down twice to empty it. The wet grains accumulate in a garbage bucket, feral as a magpie nest. He snaps a lever twice to fill the strainer with coffee and slams it down twice to pack it. While you wait for the steam to express he puts a saucer down near your elbow and on it a spoon, very small. Magpies all over the world are social birds, yet sparing of conversation and ritualistic. When the cup is put down you say, grazie and the bartender says, prego. Add sugar if desired. The café is dark as engine oil. Dark as a magpie wing. You finish café in two or three sips. Anything more lacks grace. Magpies congregate then scatter. As you do. There is almost no liquid to the experience of this coffee. It is like medicine and in some ways you hardly feel it, the caffeine. There is a moment before and one after, slightly more bracing.

Eternal City

Hotel Cervia. Someone named George arrived late in the night. He stood in the hall for a while, talking to an English girl. I woke up other times, too. There was a hum to the night, as if a machine wouldn’t shut off. Was it the hum of Rome (every city has one)? Is this what the Eternal City sounds like as it mixes with one’s nervous system in a room with a very tall ceiling? There were grindings, clattering, screeches and thuds (every city offers them). When I woke for the last time I stared from my pillow. A bare lightbulb in the shape of a flame hung from a wire ten feet above me. Through the shutters, the early sunlight cast a latticework of shadows on the ceiling and walls, making it a painting, the first thing I saw.

Within four days I found myself becoming familiar with the sights of Rome. I’d paid way more for pizza in a certain place than I might have elsewhere but descending to the underground bathroom became my experience of the catacombs. A spiral staircase so tightly coiled it might have come from a submarine had stairs covered with grime and were like seventeen display cases of 21st Century Rome, the street. The accumulated black had never been washed away, nearly petrified and pure as obsidian. In the waterworks the reservoir, strapped high to the wall, dripped eternally and the air was perfumed as if from all directions by urine and the smell of dead pigeons. Who knows where the central hole in the porcelain led. A single faucet offered more water but without a way to turn it on. Beyond the reservoir, in the ceiling corner, were miniature spider webs filled with even smaller beings who had exchanged themselves for something else in the endless transmigration of the subterranean grotto. I came out of the place like a microscope pulled from a molecule and then I was seeing fur coats and red leather purses again.

Books

Hotel Cervia. The shutters of my room are swung open. There is a building across the street, very new for Rome, with aluminum windows and lots of glass. I can see people working in the office cubicles, all women and cheerful, though most of the rooms are empty. The sky of this very sunny day reflects on some of the windows and the offices are cluttered with books and computer cables and unfashionable desks. A clock says one-thirty. The movement of people from office to office contrasts with their desks which just there sit and wait. The building is six stories tall, I think that is the height-limit for Rome and at the bottom of it there is another world, the café of espresso machines and red tablecloths where I sit for an hour each morning and write. It is called simply Bar & Pizzaria.

I’ve just thrown away most of my books. Two monographs on Piero della Francisca and guides to Assisi, Florence, Pisa and Rome. I left them on an empty newspaper stand in the Termini Roma, the huge railroad station where I arrived a week ago, stepped off the train and said “Rome, Rome, Rome.” Saying it made me smile, both because I was in Rome with a feeling of amazement and because saying it reminded me of when my son, at age six, first saw snow and exclaimed with a similar wild glee, “Snow! Snow! Snow!” I didn’t want to carry the books any further. I wouldn’t need them in Turkey and I’d just spent two hours trying to mail them without success and I still didn’t know where the right post office was. I felt good walking away from them, knowing my life was definitely not about collecting more things. I hoped someone who’d just arrived in the Termini on their way to Assisi or Pisa would find them. I’d also just done someone a small favor. A woman approached me and wanted to know where an internet café was. I walked with her across the platform and pointed exactly to where she needed to go. Sometimes one really does feel that small moments of kindness are what keeps the world from blowing up or going crazy.

Pedestrian

Last night I took my final walk in Rome. From Piazza Spagna to my hotel and then into the night, the city was a world of competing sounds, existence announcing itself, heard but unable to be found, terrific Om Ah Hums of two-cycle engines, porcelain driven into dishwashing machines, bus gearboxes and buzzing streetlights. The Forum of Julius Caesar was a pile of rubble but on the subatomic level also screeching. The history of the species sounding even as morning newspapers were printing. I turned left on Via Nazionale and came upon a dozen diesel busses idling near the Termini, angry and exhausted in the face of further driving. Miraculously, thousands of sparrows perched in trees above the busses were even louder, working their beaks in a fury, delirious cries approaching the stroke of midnight, screaming at the buses the way two thousand seagulls might scream at a dying blue whale. I’d finally had dinner with Luca who chose above all a genuine Roman ristorante for our meal where we sat elbow to elbow in a room the size of a traincar. In order to hear we had to shout only adding more decibels to the din; from a birds eye view we too were squawking, not at seeds, but at plates of veal chops and broken bread. Everything changes and at times, walking home, I could even hear my footsteps. At two AM a final motor scooter seemed to play a form of Russian roulette, blasting back and forth through the neighborhood in a four block solitary drag race, the sound of a dentist drill boring into the city without Novocain, a final trumpet blast of anxious existence refusing to slow at the intersections. Sometimes that, sometimes just the sound of my sheets wrinkling as I turned in them.

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