The Stuff that Slips Away

I started taking yoga classes a few weeks ago. It was about time, flexibility has become something that lives only as a vague and distant memory, but that’s not what I want to talk about. (And don’t worry, there will be no yoga photos. Nobody, not you, not me, wants to see that.) Anyway, while I value and enjoy the practice, one of the cooler aspects of the experience is the fact that the studio is in one of the upper rooms of the Chiostro de Bramante, a three story courtyard and accompanying structure designed by Bramante, the original architect of St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s a lovely building with a rather unusual design of more columns on the second than the first floor.
Cooler still is the building next door, the church Santa Maria Della Pace, the current façade with its semicircular, columned porch, being the work of the baroque architect and painter Pietro da Cortona (more on him later). While the outside of the church has a stately and harmonious grace, it’s what’s inside that draws the most interest. Partially because the church houses a small but remarkable fresco by Rafael but also because it is just about impossible to get inside.

There’s a sign out front that states it’s open from 10:00 AM to 12:45 PM daily but prior to a couple weeks ago, I’d never seen the gates unlocked. For that matter, I didn’t even know anyone who’d ever been inside. (Although I have to admit that’s not usually something that comes up in most conversations.) However, and I don’t know whether it’s because I’m in the neighborhood now a few mornings a week, or because the custodian has given up over sleeping for Lent, but I’ve been inside twice in the last few weeks although since then it’s been locked up tight every day. (If you are in town, you can catch an angled glimpse of the fresco through a window installed in the tea room of the Chiostro.)



The Story of Aeneas (about as close as you can get)

 Santa Maria della Pace isn’t the only building holding impressive works but for all intents and purposes blocked off from the general public. The aforementioned Pietro da Cortona seems to be particularly snake-bit in that regard. Along with Bernini and Boromini he was one of three key baroque architects, but his current popularity and recognition lag far behind his contemporaries in part because his two key buildings, della Pace and Santi Luca e Martina, are basically never open. Not only an architect, he is better remembered as a painter of frescos but his fame doesn’t fare much better in that regard. His most important work, The Story of Aeneas, adorns the ceiling of the Long Gallery of Palazzo Pamphilj, which currently serves as the Brazilian Embassy and isn’t open to the public. It can only be seen through the high windows that front Piazza Navonna. Thankfully his fresco in the Palazzo Barberini can be viewed directly and without obstruction.
Of course, there’s always the chance that a change of policy or organization will open some of these buildings up. Last fall some new areas of the Colosseum were sporadically reopened to the public. The few remaining rooms of Nero’s Domus Aurea are currently quarantined for safety’s sake but they were open to the public just a few years ago and probably will be again before too long. Some say that only about 30% of the city has been excavated so who knows what else will turn up.
Still, there are plenty places that aren’t coming back. If you walk up the Palatine Hill and look through the ruins of Domitian’s Palace, you find just enough to intellectually get an idea of how magnificent a building it was, but it’s been little more than floor plan since the Normans wrecked the joint back in the 12th century. Don’t get me wrong, I love walking through the ruins of this city but looking at the forum at night and mentally trying to reconstruct it is a different experience entirely than walking into a near-fully preserved building like the Pantheon. I hear grunts of appreciation on the hill and in the forum, in the Pantheon I hear gasps.
When I was kid, I was particularly captivated by the Colossus of Rhodes. I remember reading about all seven wonders of the ancient world but the Colossus was the one that really captured my imagination. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the renderings always showed this inaccurately huge statue astride the harbor entrance. Regardless, I had a difficult time accepting that it no longer was and that actually may have been my first protracted experience of yearning (but I could be getting carried away).

From the sublime to the ridiculous, lots of things don’t last, get lost, or we just miss ‘em by that much. I remember visiting the Parthenon back in the 70’s and wondering if the mammoth statue of Pallas Athena would ever be retrieved from its watery resting spot somewhere in the Atlantic and what it might look like now. Similarly, but not at all, a couple years prior, half way through an all-night road trip from Granville, Ohio to Austin, TX, I sat staring into the darkness of Natchez Trace State Park in TN, where a posted sign informed me that the world’s largest pecan tree was somewhere just beyond the reach of my headlights. (Actually, I didn’t much care about the pecan tree but I know a metaphor when I don’t see one.)
One way or another, things slip away. There’s a great but little seen movie called Funny Bones in which one of the characters asks “Why is it that all the good things are in the past?” Fair question, but where else would they be? The future’s an unknown and the present moment is such a small window (probably a good thing), most of what we know is in the past and often out of reach. I remember hearing some smart guy say that all literature is about the loss of the past. Off the top of my head I can think of a number of things that I really miss or missed entirely. The original McDonald’s fries, the United States steel industry, and the Pittsburg Crawfords warming up with a game of shadowball immediately come to mind.
There’s an interesting exchange in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, itself currently being revived on Broadway. At one point, a young and brilliant character bursts into tears while studying her lessons and when asked as to their cause by her callow and not as brilliant tutor, she responds that she is weeping for the lost volumes from the great library of Alexandria. He’s unruffled by her concern, responding matter-of-factly that over time other people have rewritten them. There is, of course, a lot of truth to his point, but probably not enough to invalidate that feeling of loss. Ideas do float around and come back again but the manifestations are a onetime thing. When the Taliban destroyed those Buddhas a few years back, it didn’t change the basic tenants of that religion but even the Dalai Lama said that was a very hard thing to accept.
Then again, sometimes things that you would swear were gone, come back again. Did anybody who remembered Bonomo Turkish Taffy expect to see it back on the market? In the fall of ’09, archeologists actually found Nero’s famous dining room with its revolving constellation studded ceiling, a structure that had drifted into near mythology. I suspect that one of these days somebody is going to turn up an old kinescope of a shadowball routine, and for that matter, I was reading the other week that after carefully sifting through the pieces, researchers were reasonably certain that they could reconstruct at least one of those Buddhas.
So there’s comfort in that. I doubt that fifty years ago, anybody expected that we would see the Titanic again. Now if only the same holds true for my flexibility.

Carnevale

When I got back to Rome a few weeks ago, there was a light spray of confetti all over the sidewalks. It was a little puzzling. It was too late for it to have been left over from New Year’s. St. Valentine’s Day is celebrated over here but hardly to the point of confetti (By the way, St. Valentine’s skull is on display in a church down by the Tiber. The skull has a little cloth name tag attached to its forehead as if his mom were concerned he would get it mixed up with all the other kid’s skulls at summer camp.) It seemed way too early for any pre-Lenten celebration but, it turns out, that’s what it was-Carnevale, the Italian run up to Lent.

Carnevale basically means “farewell to meat” and, like Mardi Gras, it’s a period of celebration before the self-denial of Lent. Also like Mardi Gras the official period begins shortly after Christmas (historically Carnevale began on St. Stephen’s Day, Dec. 26) but doesn’t really ramp up until the last few weeks before Ash Wednesday. Actually, in Rome, it doesn’t really ramp up at all. There’s a bit of a blow-out the final Tuesday but it’s mostly celebrated by kids. Weekends find groups of kids in costume (pirates seem particularly popular) running around throwing confetti but it’s pretty low key. If you’re looking for a celebration, you have to go to Venice.
Venice’s Carnevale tradition started back in the 12th century as a by-product of one of those religious vs secular squabbles that Italy used to specialize in. In this particular case, Ulrico of Aguileria was turned over to the Doge (think Duke) and later ransomed for a bull, 12 hogs, and a promise to make a similar gift of livestock for the next 200 years. The meat was used for a grand public feast that eventually migrated to the Tuesday before Lent and the rest is Carnevale.
The tradition survived until the latter part of the 18th century when Venice was absorbed into the Austrian Empire. Carnevale as a public event was basically outlawed as a number of traditions associated with the revelry were banned, particularly the wearing of masks throughout the city. Carnevale continued to be celebrated at private parties until the latter half of the 19th century when a number of regional practices fell by the wayside during Italy’s reunification movement. The tradition was only brought back as recently as 1970.

While the official Carnevale season begins right after Christmas, the real celebration lasts for 10 days (I was there for about 1.) and is inaugurated with the Angel Flight in which some local celebrity is strapped to a harness and slowly sent down a wire that runs from the top of St. Mark’s bell tower to the stage set up on the far end of the square. Now I have a virulent fear of heights so this strikes me as a curious honor but its origins are even more perverse. Originally it was a handful of prisoners who were given the, ahem, opportunity to crawl or walk down a wire strung from the tower to the entrance to the Doge’s palace where they could present a request for clemency. As you can imagine, the spectators weren’t gathering to witness the freeing of these prisoners but more the consequences of the inevitable misstep.
The most common feature of Carnevale is the mask. Masks feature prominently in Venetian history. Once a thriving shipping and merchant city, Venice population was easily divided along social and economic lines. Masks became a great equalizer and anyone, rich or poor, could enjoy anonymity and even equality under a mask. Masks were worn at numerous times of the year and for varying purposes, social occasions as well as activities that warranted some privacy, amorous affairs, of course, but also visiting the hospital bound or those who had sought refuge in convents.
Of course, having a large part of the population walking around in masks presented some problems and there were plenty of laws governing their use. In the first place, masks were only allowed to be worn during around six months of the year (which is still a lot). In addition a number of laws were enacted to control their use. No one wearing a mask could be armed (makes sense. Men could not mask as women and vice versa. (This one is no longer enforced, at least not during Carnevale.)

A number of people sport the traditional masks during Carnevale. Far and away, the most popular is the Bauta, a simple mask, either white or black, with eye holes and a sharply jutting jaw that resembles nothing so much as a locomotive cowcatcher. The mask, usually worn with a black tricorner hat and cloak, both allows the person to eat and drink without removing the mask and serves to disguise the voice. Much less common is the Moretta, a simple black oval that covers the face and is held in place by a stub on its back that is held in the teeth (probably why nobody wears them anymore). The Volta, a basic face fitting white mask is popular as is the mask of the Plague Doctor another white mask but with the a long stork like nose. During the plague, most real doctors opted to treat those a little less infectious and another quasi-medical corps was established . These Plague Doctors wore an early form of hazmat gear consisting of leather breeches, long tightly hooded smocks, a flat brimmed hat and a primitive gas mask of sorts. The long noses were filled with aromatic herbs and were intended to filter the air, capturing what were thought to be airborn plague pathogens.

In addition to the traditional masks, there are a good number of people wandering around in the fine brocades and powdered wigs of the Hapsburg era. There are also a lot of folks who look like they’re headed towards the nearest fraternity Halloween party. Some of these costumes look elaborate and uncomfortable(shower stalls, washing machines, etc.) but most are throw aways and toss togethers. Afro wigs, jumbo plastic glasses, and easy to attach devil horns are everywhere. The remarkable thing is that all ages are involved. Kids in strollers are getting their faces painted (sometimes none too happily) and senior citizens strut with silver tipped walking sticks. (Kids also seem to get a real kick out of the confetti tossing and the real little ones gleefully can’t seem to get over the fact that they are actually allowed to throw fistfuls of the stuff into the faces of passing grown-ups.)
Throughout the day there is a constant milling of the costumed and the plain clothed. Venice is a labyrinth, a great city in which to wander aimlessly but frustrating if you’re trying to get someplace in particular. (I was, however, given a great tip for getting around Venice-follow the crowds. 90% of the city’s streets are residential and of little interest to anyone other than the people who live on them. The crowded street s are the ones that go to “places” and usually the ones you want.) The Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Square seem to be the most common gathering areas but Venice is a city of small squares and piazzas and there’s usually some revelry or street entertainment going on in all of them.

At night, St Mark’s Square is the epicenter. I strolled through about 7 PM and it was already throbbing to Duck Sauce’s Barbra Streisand. (And just what is with that song anyway?) It was pretty clear from the outset that none of these masks were being worn for anonymity’s sake. They were intended to draw attention. Banks of tourists follow the more elaborately costumed like paparazzi, and the costumed adopt an air of indulgence with the throngs as if they put up with this every day. When I first came into the square, a large woman garbed in blue and sporting some imposing cleavage was commanding the attention of a stream of photographers until she appeared to tire of the location, parted the crowd with a wave of her hand and wander off. (Later in the evening I ran into the same woman canalside where she was talking with some friends. She had a voice like Harvey Fierstein and I thought she might have been in drag but I couldn’t quite reconcile the décolletage.

Throughout the square the dance of gawker and gawkee continued. Through the window of one bake shop a group in 18th century garb nonchalantly enjoyed their tea. (By the way, Venice has some pretty impressive pastries, a holdover of the marriage of Italian and Austrian kitchen trends) Outside a man sporting a powdered wig running about 4 ft in height made his way down the sidewalk, trailed by his faithful man servant with shaved head and Taras Bulba topknot, carrying a feather duster and what appeared to be a converted shuffleboard, uh, thing to keep the dandy dust free and his wig erect. Elsewhere, a couple of Johnny Depps, one a dead-on Jack Sparrow, the other the Mad Hatter, worked the crowd in unison. All the while, Euro-disco pumped from towers of loud speakers while a rotating crew of the more elaborately dressed shook it on down on the stage. I think it was a contest but I didn’t stick around til the end. (I barely made it past eight.)

All this is actually a little out of character for Venice, a city with the oldest mean population in Italy, if not all of Europe. The city is often described in the same terms one would reserve for an aging dowager, stately in her decline. Reminiscent of the Savannah of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (come to think of it, John Berendt followed up that hit with a book about Venice) or a pre-Katrina New Orleans on a Sunday morning, the city and its residents usually tend to move slowly, the only offered pace given its curious water-based geography. A friend says that most of the Venetians appear vaguely sedated. The population is in steady decline and the city has particular difficulty holding onto the younger citizenry. Jobs not related to tourism are few and the cost of living is high.
Still, you can’t tell any of that from Carnevale season. It’s vibrant, bustling, and capable of switching from charming to brash in the matter of a couple of steps. Some say that the city is just a few decades away from being one big museum. (Travel writer Rick Steves points out that it’s easy to buy glassware and masks in Venice but tough to find basic household supplies.) For that matter, you can probably make a pretty good argument that the return of Carnevale was an attempt to jump start the tourist season a little earlier and that the whole thing is artificial. On the other hand, it’s important to remember that these traditions do have both feet in history and it’s a unique history at that, so I tend to give it some leeway. I’m a sucker like that.

Fatal Charms

Going back to that whole Cleopatra business and farther, Rome has held a certain fascination for things Egyptian. Remnants of that fascination are still evident around the city. Purloined obelisks and Egyptian purple marble can be found all over town. Down a narrow street from the Pantheon, is a yard long stone and sandaled foot, the only visible remains of an old temple to Isis. There’s even a pyramid. There actually used to be several of them but only this one remains. 27 meters tall and built of marble in the 1st Century for praetor and tribune Gaius Cestius, it was later incorporated into the Aurelian Wall that protected and still surrounds the city. At the base of this mammoth tomb sits the Protestant Cemetery.
Cimitero Acottolico per gli Straneiri al Testaccio (The non-Catholic cemetery for foreigners in Testaccio) is the final resting spot of around 4000 souls, none Italian and none Catholic. Originally reserved for Protestants and the Orthodox, a scattering of Hebrew and Arabic headstones illustrate the relaxing of those initial proscriptions. The earliest stones date from the 1730’s and the most recent I could find was from 2007. At one time, the Catholic church stipulated that all burials had to take place after dark and reserved the right of censorship over tomb decorations and epitaphs. The cemetery is home to a few luminaries, Keats and Shelley the most prominent (Although actually, only a small but vital part of Shelley is buried here. More on that later.), Mostly it’s filled with folks unknown but no less mourned.

The cemetery is divided into two parts. The Old Cemetery, lying at the base of the pyramid is bright, pleasant, and spacious, dotted with cypress trees. It seems like a great place for a picnic. Shelley wrote that “it might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” The headstones here are lightly spread with lots of green space in between. Off in one corner is the tomb of Keats, a popular visiting spot, although it doesn’t carry his name . Feeling unappreciated by his critics in the months preceding his death from tuberculosis, he fashioned his own epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Upon his passing, his friends begrudgingly honored his request, editing a bit and adding that the grave contained “all that was mortal of a young English poet who… in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies” opted for anonymity.

Contrasted to the openness of the Old Cemetery, the New Cemetery is shadowy, overgrown, and claustrophobic. In use since 1822 (Keats, dying in 1821, just snuck in across the way), it’s not a particularly large cemetery but it’s bigger than it looks. Planted thick with trees and stones, cramped close together on a sloping hillside, little more than six inches separates its many plots. The graveled footpath is narrow and has a tendency to come and go so that often it’s hard to tell whether one’s on the path or walking across the edge of a grave. Like a number of spaces in Rome, it’s home to a host of stray cats who lend a curious ambiance to the place. There’s something a little unsettling about standing with all those gravestones at your feet, and suddenly realizing that something is brushing against your ankles.

One of the earliest residents, Shelley is buried on the highest ground against the brick wall. Actually, only his heart is buried there. He was cremated after drowning in the Ligurian Sea in 1822 and his heart was brought here for burial by his friend Edward Trelawney. When Trelawney died 59 years later, he was buried a few feet away.
There are a few folks of some fame scattered about. The American sculptor and poet William Story’s last work is Angel of Grief, the statue that adorns the grave he shares with his wife. Julius August Goethe, son of the German author is buried nearby, his name attesting to his father’s love of the city. Mostly though, the names don’t conjure up any recollection of history or accomplishment. Just names. Still, and maybe because of that, the place is fascinating. I’ve spent hours here on a few occasions, picking my way through the stones, calculating life spans and reading epitaphs. Monuments run the gamut from resolute to maudlin to heartbreaking. Many mention the departed’s passing or burial in his or her “beloved Rome.”
I suppose a number of the world’s great cities exert a pull on those outside their culture but Rome seems to be particularly attractive. Part of that is undoubtedly the density of art and architecture it holds in a relatively small space, but I think it’s important not to underestimate the subtle appeal in the fact that it’s all hanging on a spine of ruin. Chunks of marble litter some parts of town and serve as makeshift benches. Old arches and porticos are squeezed by narrow streets. Old columns absorbed by churches just a bit younger.

While the famous monuments attest to the grandeur of the Empire, they also point to the fact that when the Empire fell, it fell hard, only to suffer centuries of sacks and sieges, political infighting, religious power struggles and plain old neglect. Back street curio shops still carry copies of 18th century etchings of the unexcavated forum, cattle grazing amidst the half-buried remains of temples. Grafitti scratches mar wonders from the Colloseum to the Rafael rooms in the Vatican. It’s all very Ozymandian. There’s a certain irony in that Eternal City tag, but there's a certain romance in that crawl towards decay.
A movie called Rueben, Rueben came out twenty years or so ago starring Tom Conti as a dissipated Welsh poet on the slide and working the college circuit while he circled the drain. Towards the end he recites one of his poems (If I remember correctly, the movie was based on a Peter DeVries story so they were probably his words) in which he invites a lover to join him in setting a picnic on the precipice where they can dangle their feet into the void (or something like that). I think that same sentiment gives Rome what Shelley referred to as its “fatal charm.” While it unquestionably sports La Dolce Vita, it does so against a backdrop of tattered and ruined beauty. There’s something charming about the tension between the two.
Late last week a half dozen of us met for pizza. We were saying goodbye to a friend who was moving back to Scandanavia. At one point I looked around the table and realized that with one exception we were all from elsewhere and different elsewheres at that. I was sitting next to a young Russian woman who I knew but not well and we were talking about how we got here. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went but at one point she said, without melodrama or callous, that she had come to Rome to die. It was a few years ago and she was feeling pretty dissipated herself at the time. The logic was if she was going to wait around for her exit, Rome would be a good place to do it. Thankfully, passing on is no longer on her to-do list and she’s looking to move on (in this life, that is) but the episode echoed that charm. Not necessarily enough to distract one from the passing of time, but enough to keep one occupied.

After dinner I decided to take a stroll. A week or so ago it seemed like spring was about to bloom but this night it was back to winter. Still, it was a dry night and pleasantly crisp and it seemed like a good idea to at least try to walk off that pizza. Eventually I found myself across town on the Ponte St. Angelo, marveling (again) at St. Peter’s dome. A little wind on the water and some pondering of the eternal verities, not a bad way to cap off the evening. Cooler still, twenty feet away a street guitarist was doling out Albinoni’s Adagio. Heck, I could have been thinking about mashed potatoes and it would have still been sublime.