There is something pointless and sad about Christmas without children, perhaps its the ambiance of fake nostalgia embedded within the garish decorations and music from the 1970’s played with repetition. In England it is dark by 4.30 and doesn’t get light again until nine in the morning. When the day is blanketed in a grey wash like this, it struggles to come alive at all and instead takes on the character of an old photograph whose colors have faded and washed out and nothing, not even the Christmas lights and plastic models of Santa Clause, can revive its spirit. Its amazing how the weather fits our mood around this time of year, I can live with the damp and the darkness in cities but not in the countryside and especially not a place like this, a commuter town whose reputation has been bruised by the blandness of its housing stock that has encircled it like a fungus for the last 50 years. So I’m happy to take plane south to Italy, thankful for the relaxed policy around alcohol on these European Airlines and I am lightheaded with Prosecco and a renewed sense of freedom when we land two hours later in Rome.
The first remarkable sight you see when leaving the airport in the early evening is a tower characterized by perfectly symmetrical arches which for most people would be impossible to date, it could have been made two thousand years ago or two weeks ago. It has the same engineering precision as the aqueduct in Nimes crafted out of limestone in the first century by Romans, but a clue to its true origins lie in the mathematics of the building, known colloquially as the Colosseo Quadrato, which comes from its nine horizontal arches and six vertical ones to celebrate its sponsor, Benito (6) Mussolini (9). Therein lies the contradictions at the heart of Italian society; one that is characterized on one side by its sensuousness and emotion and on the other by the very fear of them that can only be tempered by order and disciple. In this city we saw a fiercely administered Papal organization but where naked human forms are celebrated on almost every surface of its buildings, the finest food and wines are served and engineering and design marvels are unequaled.
But how to get to know a city? My normal approach is a cautious one, to tackle it on foot without much of a plan and to rely on my eye’s to register its scale and personality rather than my brain and especially without the internet. Its an approach that requires time and optimism, offering no guarantee that it will reap the rewards we seek (and only works on cities before the advent of motor vehicles) but I like to find out the poorest quarters and the wealthiest enclaves, to view the city in its extremes. What we seek of course is authenticity, the holy grail of tourists, to find the real meaning of a place. Rome is a city I had only been briefly to once before and as I left the planning to Mary and because of two days of sightseeing from a centrally placed hotel room I left knowing little more about it. What I did take in was some of the most famous Renaissance art and architecture in the world which left me under-awed or rather questioning the motives and purpose of art, in this case it is mostly from the same period, the fifteenth and sixteen centuries, what is called the high renaissance whose main stars were Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo.
For Leonardo and Michelangelo there is substantial evidence that they were what we would call “gay” today, although I suspect it didn’t matter as much in those times, their preference was for young male beauty, and in a small way this knowledge informs how we should view the work. Its more the familiarity of what we see in the Sistine Chapel that numbs its impact for me, we know it from Tote Bags and fridge magnets and numerous monographs and histories of art, have been told endlessly of its importance, and for some it is the starting point or even the pinnacle in the history of art. It was mainly commissioned by the Catholic Church, the dominant institution at the time and one that was highly politicized, suffering the considerable burden and anxieties of defining good taste and how its image should be promoted in the world. That’s never easy to do when you work with artists who want to express themselves and their desires.
So we have Michelangelo painting larger than life images of Jesus, fully naked and in action hero mode on the walls of the Chapel only to have its penis discreetly covered at a later date to the artists fury. In order to get to the chapel you pass through seemly endless corridors of sculptures of well-proportioned men all of whom have had their penises removed, making you wonder where their problem with male genitalia comes from. Its not hard to imagine the dilemma. My weariness came from the glorification of ordinary people, of administrators and politicians mainly, elevated and successful enough to be carved out of marble to spend eternity within these walls . On Christmas eve at a family event (sinking a little too comfortably into a designated role of drunk uncle) I chastised the younger members by saying how much I disliked Taylor Swifts music causing a predictable reaction; one of the young women almost whispered to me in reverential tones that she had once actually met her, and it was that dispiriting information as well as this experience in Rome days later surrounded by the mass production, almost industrialization, of statues, fresco’s and paintings that depressed me most; societies collective need to place people (literally) on pedestals.
I’m not a Christian, and so my simplistic, provocative perspective of visiting the Vatican is that it is a walled city within a city containing an overabundance of artwork that aimed to promote events that took place some 1400 years earlier in what we now call the Middle East. They celebrate the life of a Jew called Jesus whose ideas were told to us by his followers over the following decades. I think it’s safe to say that such a person existed and had powerful idea’s, charisma and communication skills which resonated at the time, yet I wonder how he would feel seeing himself as portrayed by Michelangelo on these walls, muscular and Caucasian, or his reaction to the news of the current events? a cocktails of power, mythology and property.
I’m less angry about organized religion today than I have been in the past. The sacking of a civilization like the Roman empire wasn’t inevitable, it is hard to maintain civil society when barbarism is so close to our true nature, something to think about each time January 6 comes around. I remind myself to think instead of the benefits of good governance and order, of ethics and morality that the Church aspires to and sometimes achieves and don’t completely dismiss its hopes to create stability through storytelling and art. Rome is a place where you think of these big themes; the history of religious beliefs and power structures, the role of art to fortify them.
But the dizzying contradictions of Rome remains; in the Vatican we saw a prostate elderly beggar praying into a Pringles tube within sight of the Popes window, on our small tour group I was distracted by someone wearing a Rocky Balboa Hoody “the Italian Stallion” and also by a young Filipino couple more interested in taking images of themselves on their phones rather than seeing those on the walls and everywhere the sight of these homogenized, pale and westernized, emotional mythical figures painted without restraint. It was a relief to come to an open window where we could look out, away from the past into the present, onto the formal gardens and sunshine, but even this sight was politicized slightly by the Vatican radio tower. For a modern tourist, struggling with the ironies within this place and attempting to untangle its history, one that is so dense that it can feel overwhelming, we are left a little helpless. For the residents of the city, faced daily with the omnipresent evidence of its antiquity, a failed empire which seeps into the cities character like a sadness that cannot be shaken off, there is resignation I think.
There is a difference between admiring and liking art, and the work we see in Rome is undeniably innovative, technically remarkable and the industry and resolve of the artists is unquestionable. So was the richness of its culture at the time where science, philosophy, poetry and architecture was being propelled forward. Anyone with an opinion also has self-doubt and that was how I felt leaving the city. I caught glimpses of the real modern day Rome when packed buses took tired workers out to the suburbs, had dinner with friends eating a dish of squid so tender that I momentarily mistook it for pasta, walked along the still solemn green waters of the Tiber and a chill but sunny day. We went to see some fashionable shops including one stocked with the messy, inelegant prints and posters of Cy Twombly’s son, another with antiquarian frames without art to be used as an elaborate, show stopping, decorative device. The best part? missing a tour of the Parthenon by settling in the back of a dark café feasting on local ham and cheese feeling like we were skipping a day off school.
jnmanson 