20 - Eleanor Clarke, "Rome and a Villa" (1952)

Eleanor Clarke, Rome and a Villa, 1952

 

The Campidoglio

The first thing about the Campidoglio, aside from what it is, is the stairs.

Long flights of stairs are always beautiful, and here there are two, side by side, diverging by an odd little angle and with a narrow third one, covered by an arbor and absurdly steep, going up between them with an air of being useful and significant, as if there were no other way of getting up the hill. It is the air of almost everything in Rome. The left-hand stairs have a hundred and twenty-four steps and are not quite in line with the façade at the top, the bare brown one, stuck on like a middle-western store front, of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. That is the highest point, the arx, where Juno sat, facing the other way however, and the stairs have a good holy look of an impossible proposition, though in fact there is an easy way into the church in back. The others, more lenient and not spiritual at all, bring you to the Campidoglio.

It is the center, the starting point—a very real center in various ways, and you can get your bearings from there, as you would climb the tallest tree to look over a thick dangerous landscape. Michelangelo made what is there now, the architecture that is; the Forum, that lovely lake of time, lies over in the back; the Corso, another sort of business altogether, strikes away from the city’s great white latter-day vanity, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, which you are in the lee of. It all, speaking of time too, arranges itself most tidily from here.

Not that there is any good approach or possible start at all, really, in this wide jungle, though it seems it was not always so strange and difficult as now.

People used to come jogging down from the north by the post, firm in their travel aches and classical education, and at a certain turn the horses pulled up and the postilion cried “Ecco Roma!” and everyone tumbled out to see. They were following Hannibal’s route more or less, and there at last it would be, oh, at last!—the Dome anyway and a few other long-known shapes over the terrifying teacup panorama. Happy people, having the whole depth and wonder of a destination borne in on them so for a moment.

Or the ones of long before, say in the 6^th Century, when the place was supposed to be a shambles and certainly its memory and half its population were gone, and even so they fell down and adored it, perhaps even literally, not having known among other things that a city could be so beautiful. Or the other kind, later, reformers, flagellants, big angry Luther running away like man, trying to shake the evil dust from their feet and the laughter and murder and riches from their more delicate minds: wicked Rome, how it had betrayed them; but the dust would never be shaken till they died.

Or consider Dickens, Dr. Arnold, the English ladies Augustus Hare tells you about bargaining for lace at a certain corner of the ghetto; dark Hawthorne breathing in crime along the dark palace walls; and the English, French, German, American painters all trooping out boyishly in carriages for their annual picnic and mock pageant across the campagna. How knowing it all was, the thrill, the attachment, the indignation, the Protestant malaise. Here Caesar fell, they said to themselves, holding his toga close for modesty; here splashed the blood of the martyrs, and the captive kings walked beneath the yoke; here or there the sunset is most peculiarly Roman—they knew what they were talking about; and Stendhal could be content for days to keep coming on still another canvas by “le divin Guercin.” It is delightful to think of them all.

Now the tourist or student or wandering intellectual, the poor seeker after something or other, comes in like a wisp of fog in a fog bank, with his angst and his foggy modern eye, and there are not many words that can help him even a little to find his identity and his way: history, surrealism, faith. The angst is going to get a lot worse; the eye, if he stays long enough, will be pried open week by week as if every lash had been glued down; and meanwhile there are the mess and the blazing sun, the incongruities, the too-muchness of everything. The historian Taine said that really to profit from Rome you would have to be always in a gay mood, “or at least a healthy one;” he would not have though of using the words nowadays.

Ecco Roma indeed… But still, in a way, there it is. Something, after all, is being presented to the glazed eyeball and paralyzed sense of the worrying traveler, who came most often not looking form Rome at all but for love; whose distress about national responsibilities is painfully mixed up with anxiety over his baggage.

He sees a city full of bells and hills and walls (walls for defense, Servian, Aurelian and Vatican, it was not often an Open City; and heavy bars across the lower windows of the house walls, against all manner of crime); of many trees Nordic and tropical together, pine, ilex and palm, and water and a disturbing depth of shadows; of acres of ruins, some handsome, some shabby lumps and dumps of useless masonry, sprinkled through acres of howling modernity—an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn; of roaring motors and other dreadful noises, where some roaring festa with fireworks is always going on; whose churches are junk shops of idolatrous bric-a-brac; which calls on your awe and is absolutely lacking in any itself; where spaces open out or close up before you suddenly as in dreams, and a tormenting dreamlike sexual gaiety seems to rise you cannot tell how from the streets; a place of no grandeur whatever of any kind you expected, ravaged by fascist vulgarities; in which the president’s, until recently the royal, palace looks from the outside like an old tobacco barn, and everything you came to revere turns up in a setting as of some huge practical joke; a place beautiful at certain points, at certain moments, but closed to you, repellent, where you are always being reminded of something, you cannot tell what, but it is like the fear of falling down a deep well.

It is too much. It is a place, beneath all its obvious racket, of whispers and secrets, so various and insidious that to be open to them can be the beginning of madness, and in fact it does induce several kinds of aberration in foreigners. One you can detect behind those chilling phrases “It’s not in my field,” “It’s not in my period,” which are heard here more than in any other city. In every academy and rooming house there are one or two of these tragic wrecks, alcoholics of the single object: the numismatist, the fontomaniac, the expert on neo-classic doorknobs, the Mithraphile, the lifelong annotator of a medieval manuscript, or of the single Roman painting by an obscure English romantic, the man who tried to know the name of everything in the Forum; they are drawn, fatally, from all over the world, or turned into this after they came, and many would rather die than be dislodged. But they are no worse off than most of the foreign visitors these days.

They swirl in herbs through the Vatican Museums, around the Colosseum—you would not think, as Dante said, that there could be so many; or sit in bars for two weeks “getting the feel of the place;” or drag about in a dim melancholy of expectation and loneliness, often complicated by Roman stomach trouble; or take up with the variety of little sad fifth-rate adventurers always available along the Via Veneto, especially for homosexuals, because the city has become as much a world magnet in that respect as for Catholic converts or illuminated manuscript-worms.

There are painters again now too, lots of them, mostly Americans, and writers. For a whole generation, practically speaking since 1914, Rome has ceased to exist for them; foreign scholars could sometimes stand the dictatorship, or profit from it, but for artists it was not inviting, nor a good idea; there is the case of Ezra Pound, who remains one of the most interesting examples of mental risk in our time. Then suddenly the gates were open again and they came flocking back in with love and gratitude and pent-up need of this above all cities, and it was all brand new, as if it had never been heard of before, but it is not like a hundred years ago nor even like the beginning of this century. There is no international picnic, and not much painting or writing either, at least for the first two or three years.

Rome, being one continuity, requires wholeness, and instills it; we bring to it in ideas disgust, in feelings failure, in art something like a splintered windshield; so we are both enthralled and for a long time in nearly mortal conflict with it.

They also call it Hollywood on the Tiber; fake ruins get thrown up around the real ones; there are tremendous cocktail parties.

The city has its own language in time, its own vocabulary for the eye, for which nothing else was any preparation; no other place was so difficult, performed under the slow action of your eyes such transmutations. So the ordinary traveler runs off in relief to Florence, to the single statement, the single moment of time, the charming unity of somewhat prisonlike architecture, and is aware later of having retained from his whiz tour of Rome some stirring round the heart: those images, huge, often grotesque, were what he had been looking for, only it would have taken so long… Those who stay in Rome, where nothing is simple and the aesthetic experience is always subordinate to something else, unless they are too handicapped to start with begin to change: an awful spectacle, which can go on for years, as though some queer yeasts were working on an elephant.

On the plastic side it is fairly easy—a slow progression of taste, whatever one started with, usually leading up to a stage of having no taste at all. If anyone tells you he likes the Palace of Justice, up the Tiber from the Castel Sant’Angelo, you know he has just arrived in town and is naturally benighted, or is the opposite and has been there for three years. But that is only part of it.

The rest is an expansion in time, such as you experience also in the petrified forests of America, only here it is more intimate and so more dangerous, like a slow journeying downwards through water. There is a peculiar power in stones; you know it even from a little stone picked up on the seashore, with the ancient imprint of a starfish on it. It may happen to you to sit by a Roman fountain and find the starfish Nero crawling on your skin; it goes under, spreads in your veins, and begins to breathe with your breath; and that is only one of them. There will be strange distensions of your moral sense, your opinions on everything become unreliable. Rome is everybody’s memory, as it was a hundred or a thousand years ago; the thing now is to find a way into it.

You could start anywhere, it really doesn’t matter, you will see so little anyway:

In the air, from which you get no idea of any “seven hills” (the number in any case has been juggled considerably: one hill consists entirely of ancient potsherds, another was carted away to make room for an emperor’s forum, three of the original seven are now humped together as one) but you do see a few ups and downs, and the mountains high all around, beautifully streaked with snow in winter, of which you will always be conscious later as of the sea and its ship sounds around Manhattan; you see them from any rise, and along the Tiber, and down at the end of many long streets, as if it were a backdrop in a photographer’s booth. They give the city a transitory look, these mountains; it seems that it could be moved quite easily, but that is counteracted a little by the broken lines of the old aqueducts, not romantic at all from up there, coming in across the flat country; coming in much farther than you would ever think from below, to blend with sections of the brick Aurelian wall right in the busiest tangle of the city. They are of course distinctly Roman, so are the eccentric color and course of the Tiber, and the fury of the little figures you see twitching about on the football (soccer) fields, but nothing is nearly as lovely or permanent-looking in this view as the railroad tracks: a cool graph of somewhat insane lines with their ends, in a sudden reversion to control, all coming sidelong together like a boxful of pencils.

You have a sense of being yourself in control of the situation from the air. Nothing looks very old; or rather great time with all its human reference becomes an abstraction and you can grasp it without much trouble, as an aviator could destroy the place without much sorrow; which only makes it more crushing when the enormity of the specific begins breaking over you, down below.

Or you could come in on those tracks, no clean geometry but whether in the compartment or the anarchically packed aisle a sausage machine of communications among strangers, of egos, curiosities, irritations, longings and belongings caught in the moment of displacement, at the end of which the returning Roman, bete noire of your trip, salutes you with the true princely graciousness just as in the days of the post-chaise, becomes for a second your host, before removing himself from the little streaming wreckage, just then, of your life; and throw yourself the next morning on the big schoolbook things, Colosseum, Moses, Saint Peter’s, etc.

Or in your impossible state take in the full impossible-ness of Rome right there, moving from what is becoming, after long dissension, a very handsome modern railroad station, to Piazza Esedra: a place of late 19^th Century arcades (the Turin phase of the city) centering in that “horrible” fin-de-siècle fountain, set between the sprawling old hulk of the Baths of Diocletian and the commercial riot and rubbish of the Via Nazionale. In summer an all-girls’ orchestra plays with demon exuberance at the swollen piazza café—there is in this pushing out and out, a jungle fluorescence, all over the city in warm weather, everything has too much energy for its space; and at night, oblivious of the hell of neon that bursts forth along the Via Nazionale, the sexy and equally energetic fountain, with its naked can-can ladies and marine monsters, is lit up as if it were the most sacred pride of the city.

Or be genteel, jump off into one of those pleasant old watercolors of Rome, as in the little piazza called the Mouth of Truth after the big marble face of the sun in the church portico, whose mouth was supposed to snap shut if you put your hand in it and told a lie, but which was perhaps an ancient sewer lid; both could be true, and it is nice to think of such massive pieces of sculpture having that double function here and there in the streets. Everybody likes this spot; it is so comforting, so charmingly pure and right. The two little ancient postcard temples, the round and the rectangular, are as fine as in the pictures, the fountain gives a pensive air, and the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, also little, is of the “right” centuries: 4^th to 12^th, nothing fancy or voluptuous. The modern or Bauhaus eye and the cozy sense are jointly satisfied; Rome is possible.

Yet after all it is not so tame; something, you see as you look back, has gotten jiggled in the old watercolor, as if you had looked at it through moving water; something is wrong. The little temples are angry. Up the sterile sun-cruel avenue the fascists made here, past their office buildings like houses for geneticide, the bits and columns of three other temples, holding in their Cerberus bite the tiny and otherwise nondescript church of San Nicola in Carcere, are something more than picturesque. You have to be careful, time can snap shut on your hand; against a wall, beyond the long, long shadow of the traffic cop, an obscene shrouded shape has risen, painted thirty years ago by Chirico.

Or sit, as foreigners do, hoping to see movie stars, on tree-lined Via Veneto, site of the big hotels, the American Embassy and the most elaborate arrangement of monk’s bones anywhere; which set out to be Rome’s climbing vinelike version of the Champs Elysées and has turned instead into a street of shady deals and sun-back dresses; beyond the top of which, just outside those Aurelian walls you saw from the sky, the riding-track in the Borghese gardens, called the gallopatoio (sic), is strewn in every morning with contraceptives. Sadness, ignoble disappointment, everything that is a little stale or tarnished stalk this so-called elegant street; something is wrong; Rome’s real elegance was never on parade.

Or go up on the Janiculum thick with Garibaldiana—it is still a surprise, this Italy—where Lars Porsena had his camp and Cleopatra her villa, where the house-size Fontana Paola shows the baroque at its most loving and serene and the clarity of Roman light plays its most astounding tricks, and read the dirty and other scribblings on the lighthouse. “When graffiti are found in large numbers in one and the same place they gain the importance of a historical document” (Lanciani, 1891). The city, wonderfully flushed at twilight, is laid out beneath you in a perfection of worked enamel, a Cellini affair only the pieces live, the mountains with their winter snow might move; or as Dr. Arnold wrote of a neighboring height: “One may safely say that the world cannot contain many views of such mingled beauty and interest as this.”

Another approach is through the keyhole of the Knights of Malta, on that religious hill, the Aventine. The Piazza, designed by Piranesi, more like a little landscaped plateau, has a dead-end or Tibetan feeling well suited to the well-known property of the keyhole, which is to present, in miniature at the end of a telescope of pleached trees, the Dome. It is good Easter-egg magic, always a hit, and for good reason; the trickery is basic. The Dome, which has a way of following you around the town, proclaiming Michelangelo and the center of the world—whatever you think, that is what it proclaims—happens not to be visible from anywhere else on that street, and looks, through the keyhole, more like an image abstracted from the real thing and placed there by some feat of physics, so that you are surprised not to find some other basilica in the second keyhole in the same door. It is both real and not real, there and not there; and so an object in space clearly illustrates for you the trickery of all Rome, which has to do, as Pirandello was trying to say, with time.

You could start the long journey under the Dome too, or up in its lantern, but that is not wise. Better to see it from everywhere else first, in the various sizes and aspects it assumes: sentimentally in the best sense, across Corot’s basin under the pines, looming like the giant at the top of the beanstalk at a certain turn of the river, small and with the late sun striking so fiercely through its windows, the top will be only a black shell sitting in the air; almost everywhere except in the middle-class district of Prati, one of the nearest to it. That quarter was designed in the last century by the Masons, who performed the odd stunt of blocking the view of Saint Peter’s from all but a single street in the whole section; it was not the center of their world and they put real genius into ignoring it.

Any of these will do: the entrance to Rome is no longer a matter of geography. It is a place secret, sensuous, oblique, a poem and to be known as a poem; a vast untidiness peopled with characters and symbols so profound they join the imagery of your own dreams, whose grandeur also is of dreams, never of statements or avenues; from which the hurrying determined mind takes nothing but its own agenda, while the fearful logic and synthesis that were there escape like a lion from the zoo.

But the Campidoglio is at least in the middle. It is also where the most things happened over the longest time, and can give you the most solid example of that four-dimensional art form that goers by the name of the Eternal or even the Holy City.

It is true you are spared the baroque just here, and at a certain moment a large part of the city suddenly wore that new expression, but if you brood a while on what does appear on this small hilltop you will be pretty far over into the baroque as a way of thinking, if not out the other side. The scorn of neatness, the deep fantasy of juxtaposition are there, beyond the power of any poet or period; nobody could be so ruthless. The author of this creation is time, in collaboration with aesthetic judgement and energy, which has smashed and transgressed in one way or another at every point as art always does, until the fine and the atrocious are a joint essence of the one always contemporary work, and the eye of the beholder loses all independence from memory, which makes it hard on us in these days who lack both memory and eye. The humor of it too is beyond any talent; Parisian DaDa would have made no ripple here. The combinations of cars around town, from Fiato “little mice” which you could carry in a pinch, to the Vatican or Diplomatic Corps Cadillacs, would look absurd anywhere else but in Rome only fall in with the buildings and the statues, and history as well; and that is only the matter of scale.

Not that the Campidoglio is all so funny; the parts are not. Michelangelo’s square, subtly enlarged by the trapezoid angle of the side palaces and the views back from their ends, is the most rational in the city, a strong thrust, up through the night imagery, of grace and mastery of form, as the Dome is or that other creation partly from the same mind, although a mere private house, the Palazzo Farnese. The proportions are exquisite, and to scale with the human body; the three façades with their balustrades and statues—crochetwork of the aging Renaissance—the two side ones with their porticoes and the somewhat insincere elegance of their upper window columns, the Senators’ Palace at the back presiding by reason of its clock-tower and handsome double stairs, are a text of unity, a single, and considering the actual size, oddly spacious experience. But the larger design is something else; shabbiness, wreckage, unreason will pour in on you in a moment.

This gracious symmetry is crouched under the white cliffs of the Victor Emmanuel Monument, which ignored Michelangelo as he in time ignored the brown naked medieval majesty of Aracoeli, a dress-pattern shape and one of the most poignant surfaces in the city, now wedged in between the two. Not that anyone stops revering it for that, nor minds its having been a town hall as well as a church for quite a few centuries; the civic and the supernatural never could stay separate on these hills, they were always rolling back into one; the church was named for an apocryphal tale conveniently linking Augustus with the coming of Christ, the stairs, from an ancient temple, were put up here for penance purposes to stop the plague of 1348, the most prominent of the miracle-working bambini is still there and still miraculous. These matters, along with the beauty of the façade, survive quite well in the lee of the monument—a confectioner’s typewriter, some call it; and down in back there was always the Forum, a quarry and cow pasture, lazily creating its own derangement of the senses.

Among the characters present here there is the same mutual obliviousness in everything; role, genre, epoch, scale, materials.

The central one, and so the Dome to the contrary the center of all Rome, is Marcus Aurelius on his famous plump-bellied bronze horse, whose forelock was going to sing to announce the end of the world, and may still: a statue described by the fascist guidebook as having had “a tremendous influence on all of modern art.” Probably it did have quite an influence on other equestrian statues as long as the genre lasted. It is modest and grave and powerful, decent in scale and spirit; the horse, always a peculiar animal, is all fire and strength and seems restrained more by his own sense of statecraft than by the rider, who in any case has no stirrups and is otherwise occupied, his right hand, palm downward, being extended in a gesture that is of both command and benediction. If one should want to be so commanded or blessed, and aside from the awkwardness of all official art, aside too from certain reservations in one’s feeling about this particular emperor, and the fact that there was originally a bronze barbarian under the horse’s raised front hoof, this would be very fine. Anyway it is not hysterical; the father-ruler, you would say, had been caught here in his last really appropriate moment, eighteen hundred years ago; at least he could be nobly portrayed; and actually the person of the father is not important in this case. The statue is of the blessing and dignity of Roman Law, sunk so deep, both sculptor and model can render it as their own most native truth.

This steed, however, stands in peaceful conjunction with two others of a different condition and breed altogether. They are of marble, and are there with their trainers the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, cracked, nicked, enormous and beautiful at the top of the Campidoglio stairs; heroic statuary borrowed from an age Rome never knew, but the borrowings go deep; the horses, like the centaurs and marine ones scattered all over the city, are to be taken as literally as the emperor’s or Garibaldi’s up on the Janiculum.

These are the other twins, the miracle-workers, with the strength and wonder of the unknown in them, complement to Romulus and Remus. It is true there is something extra-human in any case, aside from the wolf, in this notion of twins; the nation was plainly announcing from the start that it was not interested in personality; but the indigenous pair, however unnatural, have only an indirect relation to the supernatural. They are all flesh and blood, strengthened with wolf milk and much oftener unpleasant than not, whether in the way of virtue or vice. Roman Law or not, they belong to the dark; in general one thinks of the beginning and end of Rome’s old power as pictures of a scary night, full of the terrors of the fighting first, and more fighting of another kind of terror afterwards. But the Dioscuri stream with light like the saints.

That is the way they stand here by the stairs, and the way one sees them appearing out of nowhere to win the great battle of Lake Regillus against the Latins and Etruscans in 496 B.C. There is none of the later nervous glory of the empire in that story; it is all comfort and radiance, as though a pair of angels had appeared to push George Washington across the Delaware. A few minutes after the victory they were seen far away in the Roman Forum, showing signs of their great exertion but still, one imagines, walking in a golden light, with no expression on their faces—they never look at each other or at anyone, and are so beautiful you would not want them to; then they water their horses at a certain nymph’s spring that is still there, which is appealing too, you would not suppose that they would need to, and quietly vanish.

There is no such lovely beneficence on the other side. The faces of the Roman twins are far from inexpressive, and where they come in things are usually grim, beginning with Romulus killing Remus for jumping over his wall. The illuminating thing is that Law, or the highest social reason, could emerge through these extravagances. The country is always in danger; there is a premium on psychological monstrosity, not always exempt from plain nastiness; and how new the tales of it sound now, as if some savage genius had just thought them up, with the dark circle of the unknown enemy always pressing close around. Consider them: Horatio at the bridge; Mucius Scaevola around the same time burning his hand off in Lars Porsena’s camp; Virgilius stabbing his daughter, and dry-eyed Brutus, five hundred years before Caesar’s friend, witnessing the execution of his sons; the mother of the Gracchi; M. Curtius leaping with his horse into the abyss in the Forum because Rome’s dearest possession must be sacrificed to close it; and during the empire, in a time of famine, a lady could pull a stranded grain-ship off a sandbank in the Tiber by tying a string to it and saying “Follow me if I am chaste.” Human nature has never been so satirized.

There is the dark episode of the Gauls and the cackling geese too, which occurred in the citadel around the corner from the Campidoglio. That time the country was saved by a man named Marcus Manlius, who as a result of political intrigue was ruined shortly afterwards, like many national heroes before and after him. He was not executed just on this spot, because it was though better in his case to do it out of sight of the citadel he had saved; however, there is still a live wolf there in a cage. The famous snarling Etruscan one, with a pair of Renaissance babies added beneath its udders, is in the museum on your left.

The collage continues in the courtyard of the right-hand palace, called the Conservators’, where the central piece is a broken-off head of Constantine as big as a wine barrel, but that was normal. Augustus, who passed for frugal, had a bronze statue of himself 50 feet high in a reading room on the Palatine; one of Nero was twice that tall, the head measuring 6 feet; the Emperor Gallienus is said to have planned one for himself as the sun on the Esquiline, to be 219 feet tall or twice the height of Trajan’s Column, which marks the height of the hill that was removed from there.

Here there are other parts of the body or a body the same size lying around, a foot, a section of forearm; there has been a trunk murder between giants only there are two right hands, the forefingers pointing up, to what?—to something in the lucidity of that sky like a child’s blue eye, theology or the glory of Rome or the memory of the marble murder, never to be recaptured through the fingers point till the next ice age. There is also a not quite typical scavenger’s exhibit around the walls, the soil of Rome being stocked to a great depth with words, bits of architecture and sculptured limbs, tombstones and all the other compost of civilized time, for which there continues to be a brisk black market.

As for hawk-nosed Constantine, official bringer-in of Christianity, he may have been what the time required but it is hard to think of his great battle at the Ponte Milvio as instituting anything one would have cared to side with right away. A rather basic sentimentality is imperiled by this huge hatched-face; but that is Rome too, the danger is equal in politics, in art, in love. His lady mother Saint Helena never strikes one as very attractive either, with all her busy pilfering of holy objects including a whole flight of marble stairs from Jerusalem. It was in the tradition; Rome, never creative in mysteries, had come by most of her holinesses the same way, most notably the black rock or Great Mother, which Italy has never since been able to do without. Still, there is a particular note of The Ghost Goes West in this other performance, whereby the blood of the martyrs was both ridiculed and brought to serve its purpose, and the astral horse-tamers, children of a wan, set out on their long dim way to changing their names and becoming really saints. For the time being, anyway, it was traumatic; nobody for a long time after the baptism of Constantine seems to have remembered anything that had happened before.

They were not even very clear about him. The bronze Marcus Aurelius outside was preserved all through the Middle Ages only because it was mistaken for Constantine, whose features would seem hard to forget, and there is something of the agony of the amnesiac in the legend about it, one of several of the kind concerning Rome, all with the same pathological anguish and terror in them. Its gliding, of which you can see a little now, was slowly returning, and it was when it was all there that the horse’s forelock, which does look like a perching bird, would sing, and then would be the Last Judgement.

But memory did return, in its own good time; the monks and the river gods between them had been looking after it.

They are there too, those guardian rivers, as they are everywhere in the city, along with the tritons and obelisks and fountains and all the mythical horses, half human, or half fish, that are the poem’s deepest imagery. You walk close to your dreams, and that is the sexual gaiety that rises from the streets. If all the crosses in this Holy City disappeared overnight it would hardly be noticeable, but if the obelisks or the river gods were gone it would be as if the city had had a frontal lobotomy; everyone would know that its deepest nature had been interfered with in some way.

The most famous of the three rivers here is the one in the court of the Capitoline Museum, called Marforio from the street where he used to be. He is reclining like an ancient Roman at a banquet as all rivers do, fat and lazy and with not a split but a fine full double personality. He is water, and that is Rome’s element, and he is, or was, a wit, and that is Rome’s character. Even now you hear him spoken of with special affection for having been involved, together with The Foot and some other statues, in the dangerous satirical dialogues started in the 16^th Century by the tailor Pasquin, who pasted the first lampoons on the lump of ancient sculpture since named for him; the barbari and Barberini pun first appeared there, one of thousands; there were not many popes, cardinals or rulers generally who escaped, any more than they do now, but Marforio at least was moved up to the Capitol to keep him quiet, as quiet as a river can be. His role, or rather both his roles, would have had to be more secretive anyway under fascism; now the political one has been taken over in part by the radio. Moritur et ridet, as some tourist said of the Roman people ages ago; they would laugh on their deathbeds.

There is another crucial figure here, a human, and speaking only of the visible ones. The rest are the long community of Rome in all its time, the one enduring present in which one moves, and which so strangely annihilates geography. Here or in the bald Mamertine prisons below or anywhere, the map on which you know yourself situated is rarely of Europe, you feel outside of that, but of centuries, and distances are in time; something which only running water can convey or make bearable, hence the fountains of Rome. But there is another character in the actual Campidoglio cast, of bronze, in medieval dress and less than life size, standing halfway down between the two flights of stairs, with the useless little third one beside him.

This is poor crazy Cola di Rienzo, the Tribunus Augustus, Knight of the Holy Ghost and so on—in whom toward the end of the second dreadful night the nostalgia for light and the anguish of confused memory flared up most pathetically. Yet he was not entirely crazy; the yearning was so extreme, many could believe in him; even Petrarch, who had recently been crowned with laurel here in the square that preceded Michelangelo’s, had thought for a while that this inspired man of the people, in restoring Rome’s grandeur and authority would save more than the country; it seemed the human mind itself must be thin without that center. How the idea got perverted in this instance is beautifully told by the historian Gregorovius, who only made the mistake, natural in the 19^th Century, of assuming that such weird resurrections had stopped with the 14^th.

Marcus Aurelius and his horse were not here then. The statue, still thought to be of Constantine, stood in front of the half-ruined Lateran at the time, and when Cola, having bathed for mystical purposes in the font where Constantine was baptized, had himself knighted in the basilica on the old pagan festival of August 1^st (Christianized) the people celebrated with a huge banquet outside and the horse, instead of announcing the end of the world, was made to pour wine and water from its nostrils, while Cola conferred the blessing of Rome on the universe. The Roman people, the old S.P.Q.R. as you can read it on the sewer lids and urinals now, were going to run the world again, though at the moment their monuments were fortresses, the roofs of most of their churches had fallen in, the pope was in Avignon and the city of Florence among others had no intention of being run by them. Nevertheless they cheered while he had himself crowned with six mystical wreaths, then pointing a sword in three directions in the air cried three times, “This is mine!”

The scene occurred in 1347, or the year before the Aracoeli stairs were put up to stop the plague, though one version is that they were erected the year before and he was the first to walk up them. At any rate he was probably the first to roll down them without his head, having been literally torn to pieces on the Campidoglio. That was after a seven years’ exile and a triumphant comeback of two months, and it happened to the shout, as terrible as the war cries of the barons, of “Popolo! Popolo!”—the same who had drunk from the horse’s nostrlis, and who would die laughing; after which they left him hanging headless for two days outside the church of San Marcello on the Corso.

The pedestal of his small statue is covered with another of those assortments of ancient bric-a-brac plastered in every which way, perhaps by accident, through some workman’s caprice, in imitation of thousands of house and garden walls in the city, and perhaps not; they would not have done it to a statue of Augustus, but then if Cola had not reminded them for a little while of Augustus there would not be any statue of him at all, and the mad little work of decoration seems touching here. But it is the right hand that is remarkable. It is extended, not like the emperor’s in the piazza above but all the way, high and with the palm turned up and the rapt finders wildly spread, and from each finger tip the man’s visionary will seems to issue like a piercing scream, as though his volition alone would be a crowbar to move both heaven and the accumulated happenings of a thousand disjointed years.

The collection of right hands in the Campidoglio is altogether quite remarkable. There is this, and the sober, vastly controlled one of Marcus Aurelius or Roman Law, and in the courtyard opposite Marforio the two white right fists, with their giant enigmatic forefingers pointing up into eternity.

The Victor Emmanuel Monument, surmounted by allegorical chariots, which was inaugurated in 1911 and had taken twenty-six years to build, is of Brescia marble known for its cold and stupefying whiteness; you can judge by comparing it, as rock, with the Dioscuri. However if that or the Colosseum had to be bombed it might be hard for a second to decide; at least it has a peculiarly vitalizing effect on the Forum and Michelangelo; not that a good piece of modern architecture would not do the same thing much better or that there is really any reason not to tear the thing down, except that it is called the Altar of the Country and many Italians like it.

Another important point about the Campidoglio is not to see it when the sun is too high; the best time is early in the morning though winter there is more leeway. The piazza of the Quirinal on the other hand, where the second pari of Dioscuri are, in front of the barnlike president’s or royal palace, comes into its color and its own lyrical majesty, so unlike what anyone comes looking for, suddenly in the late afternoon. Either of them, and even more the Forum, seen in the high flat hours, can put you in a far from gay or healthy mood. The composition disintegrates, the stones are dead, you and a million lizards move in a sun-split devastation where once, you cannot remember how long ago, there had been the good green of memory and Rome; it is all over forever; it was finished a million years ago. Actually the city is only having its daily nap and in a few hours, winter or summer, will be swelling every street with the crush and clamor of its daily promenade.