A Salon article on the experience of traveling in Rome. Read more here
On the Fourth of July, a little group of Americans held a patriotic celebration in Rome’s Piazza Farnese. We chose a spot near one of the two monumental fountains, huge basins that were originally in the Baths of Caracalla, built around A.D. 212. In typical Roman fashion, some bigwig swiped them 500 years ago to use as ornamental gardenware in his front yard. It wasn’t our idea to use a 2,000-year-old bathtub as the backdrop for a celebration of America’s dubious performance in the War of 1812, it was our friends’, two teachers living in Rome. But our group of 10 (we were traveling with another family of four) happily went along with it.
You go to Rome to get high on history. But history speaks only in fragments. Once you realize you can’t get your arms around the Renaissance, let alone the classical and Christian eras, you give up trying to catch two thousand years of time and settle for moments.
Rome specializes in these surreal time tunnels, moments when the past suddenly undercuts the present. If you’re lucky enough to fall down one of those tunnels, you close your eyes and keep dropping as long as you can.
And in Rome, every street can open beneath your feet.
Sometimes, walking through a city, I imagine that it is a living organism, and that its streets are neural passageways, the frozen residue of thoughts. That dead-end alley in Chinatown is not a walkway to nowhere but a complex line in a poem, one written in an exquisite unknown grammar that you suddenly are able to comprehend. At such moments the city becomes a mirror that reflects your memories and desires. Space overpowers time: As you walk through its streets, you are walking through your own life. Every unknown building and bend in the road are chapters in a story that has already been finished yet is still beginning.
Novelists have always been drawn to the idea that great cities are themselves characters, personages so powerful they take center stage. In Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels, Paris is as important a character as the weary, burly detective. At the end of Balzac’s “Lost Illusions,” the hero looks down upon the “hive” of Paris and vows to conquer it. The fog of Dickens’ London is a living force. The apotheosis of this uncanny reversal of humanity and city is found in Paul Auster’s “City of Glass,” when a character’s erratic movements through the streets of New York are revealed to be a hieroglyph that must be deciphered. In Rome, the streets sometimes feel like animal trails in the great forest of human history — paths that are at once unutterably weighty and completely random.
Our last night in Rome, we wandered at dusk through the Ghetto. A coolness had fallen on the city and the shadows lingered on the piazzas. Passing the Portal of Octavian, we came to the end of a dead-end street. Below, in the shadow of the Theater of Marcellus, a pianist was playing Chopin. A few listeners were sitting on a railing; a woman was painting. Ahead of us rose up the three illuminated columns of the Temple of Apollo, built in 20 B.C., when the Roman republic, the glory of the world, had just fallen. The past touched us, a brief blast of trumpets and light, then receded into the gathering darkness, leaving only a faint echo, like the sound of the sea. It was one of a thousand corners in this unknowable city. We looked around to remember this fleeting and eternal moment. And then we walked on.