Postcard from Rome
Glory and grandeur and tourism
Note: apologies for the long delay between posts. I was in Italy for a friend’s wedding, and had no time for reading or writing. Now that I’m back home, posts will be appearing at their regular frequency.
My plane out of Sydney was delayed – causing me to miss my connecting flight and extending my total travel time to about forty hours – and when I finally arrived in Rome I was struck by the impressive, thronging vision of tourists. Big, loud, obstructive tourists.
Wasn’t I also a tourist?
Yes, but I deserved to be there. Your flight was seventeen hours? Boo hoo! You haven’t earned anything – get out of my way!
The art critic Robert Hughes has a coruscating chapter about this that ends his book on Rome:
Painting and sculpture are silent arts, and deserve silence (not phony reverence, just quiet) from those who look at them. Let it be inscribed on the portals of the world’s museums: what you will see in here is not meant to be a social experience. Shut up and use your eyes. Groups with guides, docents, etc., admitted Wednesdays only, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, please, pretty please, if you can, if you don’t mind, if you won’t burst. We have come a long way to look at these objects, too. We have not done so to listen to your golden words. Capisce?
In a supposedly holy city, one that has produced numerous saints, the locals were quite unhelpful. At my overpriced accommodation, the staff were completely useless:
Do you have a map of the city? No.
Can you help me book tickets for this museum? No.
Can I meet the Pope and talk to him about where I think the Catholic Church has gone wrong? No.
See what I mean? Completely useless.
The only one who helped me was the guy at the desk in the mornings. To show my gratitude – and to show that I thought he was doing a much better job than his colleagues – I tried to make his life a bit easier. When he asked if I could answer a survey for his thesis, I said “sure. What’s it about?”
“Overtourism in Rome… Nothing against you personally,” he assured me.
He ignored my suggestion that only people who can read Latin should be permitted to enter Rome. Regardless, I answered his survey then went for a walk around the city.
As I didn’t have a map, and my phone wasn’t connected to any network, I quickly got lost. I ended up in a part of town with wide roads congested by traffic. Italian drivers don’t stop for pedestrians or red lights. The metro system was under construction (as it was when I was last here) and I imagine progress is slow because every time you dig below ground level you invariably find the remains of some ancient ruin or temple or Pope. So what’s a boy to do? You walk left, you can’t get across; you walk right, you can’t get across. All the pedestrian signs flash their red men: DON’T WALK. You feel like any ill-discipline, any mistimed step, and there will be a screech, a car horn, and a raging fist out the driver’s window. You’re not a Catholic, but you pray for the Virgin Mary to transport you across the road, and she does, miraculously.
I had visited Rome once before, in 2015, but not even that prepared me for the wonders of the place. I accidentally found the Colosseum. Growing up in Australia, I only saw it through photos and descriptions. Nineteenth-century travellers particularly admired it because of its romantic ruined state. In 1846, Charles Dickens declared:
To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapet, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted in the centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. GOD be thanked, a ruin!
In Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto IV, 1818) Lord Byron devotes a few stanzas to it:
Arches on arches! as it were that Rome,
Collecting the chief trophies of her line,
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome
Her Coliseum stands; the moonbeams shine
As 'twere its natural torches, for divine
Should be the light which streams here, to illume
This long explored but still exhaustless mine
Of contemplation; and the azure gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume
Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven,
Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument,
And shadows forth its glory. There is given
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,
A spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power
And magic in the ruined battlement,
For which the palace of the present hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.
I wish I could have seen it when Dickens and Byron did, when Rome had more grandeur and fewer walking groups and tourist stalls.
In fact, part of what has sharpened my feelings against tourists is that I managed to find a couple of museums that were almost completely deserted. These exhibits are in a popular part of town, are inexpensive (one is free) and full of interesting things – and I was the only one visiting. Why? My guess is that they don’t appear on tourist websites such as TripAdvisor.
The Renaissance Palazza Farnesina ai Baullari (or Piccola Farnesina) houses the collection of ancient sculpture formed by the scholar Giovanni Barracco (1829 – 1914). The pieces on display include fine examples of sculpture from early civilisations (ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Phoenicia) right up to the Imperial Roman era, offering a panorama of ancient Mediterranean art. There are some statues of the household deity Bes:
There’s a Hellenistic sculpture of a dog licking her wounds:
And much more.
Across the road in the Palazzo Braschi is the Museo di Roma, “Museum of Rome,” which has this impressive staircase:
I love this depiction of The Triumph of Venus Anadyomene:
Look at that brazen smirk! And the baby looks like he’s about to slam-dunk that basket onto her head!
So why were these museums empty? The reality is that most people do not actually care about art. How many people visit the galleries even in their home cities? Robert Hughes again:
Most Italians are artistic illiterates. Most people anywhere are; why should Italians be any different? Though once they pretended not to be, today most of them can’t even bother to pretend. Many of them see the past as a profitable encumbrance…
You might say that it has always been this way, but actually it has not. It has gotten worse since the sixties with the colossal, steamrolling, mind-obliterating power of TV – whose Italian forms are among the worst in the world. The cultural IQ of the Italian nation, if one can speak of such a thing, has dropped considerably, and the culprit seems to be television, as it is in other countries. What is the point of fostering elites that few care about? It bestows no political advantage. In a wholly upfront culture of football, “reality” shows, and celebrity games, a culture of pure distraction, it is no longer embarrassing to admit that Donatello, like the temperature of the polar ice cap or the insect population of the Amazon, is one of those things about which you … do not personally give a rat’s ass.
If there are solutions to these problems, I don’t know what they are. There are too many people, yes, but even if the city were empty there would be another complication: there is too much to see. I had only one day to myself in Rome, and even that was overwhelming. Another Aussie, A.D. Hope, expresses this feeling quite cheekily in his long poem “A Letter from Rome”:
The Tourist’s fate though curiously reversed
Is that of Tantalus who watched a feast
Devoured by famine, who, consumed by thirst
Saw the cool waters rising to his breast.
The tourist has to cram until he burst
Or gulp until he vomit like a beast;
But either way the case is much the same;
The arrows of desire miss their aim.Six weeks in Italy! He has to grapple
With all the culture that there is to see
In baptistery, temple, church or chapel,
Museum, mausoleum, gallery.
Adam was cursed for eating that one apple,
But had he finished the whole fatal tree
He might have found that gorging Good and Evil
Led less to Sin and Death than mere upheaval.*
Day after day, with guide-book at the ready,
I’ve stormed the galleries from hall to hall,
Where headless muse or mutilated lady
Are flanked by god unsexed or Dying Gaul.
Checking my members every night in bed, I
Have groaned, I must admit, as I recall
That on the morrow waits for me a fresh
Mountain of marble chiselled into flesh.I’ve contemplated all the types of Venus
Which win the heart or take the soul by storm,
The modest fig-leaf and the shameless penis
In every proper or improper form,
Until the individual in the genus
Is lost and all exceptions in the norm,
And fair and foul and quaint and crass and crude
Dissolve in one vast cliché of the Nude.
I’ve been a bit grumpy in this missive, but not even the tourists can dispel the numinous feeling that pervades Rome. It really is a marvel, a glory. Will there ever be another Piazza Navona? Yeah, right. Will any artist or architect ever match the monumental achievement of Saint Peter’s Square? Don’t hold your breath. Will this gift, created by genius and preserved for millennia, survive the indifference and philistinism of a generation brought up on TikTok and Instagram? If it does, Rome really might be the Eternal City.
