The thing about Rome is that it always manages to give you something special. There’s always a hint of magic, be it something as simple as peering furtively in to admire the front hall of an ancient palazzo, or looking up to glimpse the wooden-beamed ceilings of apartments from the street, or just breathing in the mingled scents of wax candles and incense in a church you visit for the first time. Even stopping for a quick and refreshing drink from the nasoni, Rome’s distinctive nose-shaped curved brass drinking fountains that dot the streets, can be a pure and simple joy.
It’s true that for us Romans a stroll through the streets usually involves hidden lanes and nooks and little shops that tourists overlook, rather than the Colosseum or the Pantheon. That’s not to say that from time to time we don’t enjoy touring—again (which is to say, for the umpteenth time in our lives)—the Colosseum or the Pantheon, but sipping an espresso in a half-hidden little piazza, as spring blossoms all around you, under the world-weary eyes of a cat stretching out comfortably nearby . . . well, that’s a whole different kind of pleasure.
Rome is all this, but also much more. It’s a city with a thousand faces, but to a Roman, it is, quite simply: Roma.
Admittedly, Rome has other names and attributes: the Eternal City, caput mundi (in Latin, “capital of the world”), the cradle of modern civilization. And even though every Roman has had these ideas drummed into his heart and mind from infancy, we often choose to forget them.
Say that destiny decrees you are born in Arizona, or Chile, or India, or else in Haiti, the Virgin Islands, the Netherlands. You could be born into any of a thousand other places. But if destiny decides you are to be born in Italy, and then narrows it down even further to—exceptionally—Rome, at a certain point in your life you start to feel that being born in Chile or India wouldn’t have been exactly the same thing for you. But not for the obvious reasons. In fact, you can pretend it’s nothing special until you’re a teenager. You can keep on playing soccer, kicking the ball against the ancient city’s Aurelian Walls near the Porta Metronia—the walls are only two thousand years old, but you don’t know that yet. But as an adult, how can you pretend to be unimpressed when, after a full hour in a slowly moving line of cars, bumping over the sampietrino cobblestones, roughly as old as the walls, it dawns on you that for the past twenty years you’ve been “using” the Colosseum more or less as a traffic median? Or that—today like any other day—disgusted at the delay the traffic has caused, making you late for your business meeting, you haven’t even noticed the wealth of history that surrounds you on all sides?
At a certain point in your life, you understand that—quite simply—you happen to have been born in the most beautiful city on earth. And you think back, in no particular order, to everything it’s given you. You think back to the excursions you took as a child to the “beaches of Rome,” at Ostia, and you remember your astonishment at the fact that the shoreline—mile after mile of sand and the unspoiled, sweet-smelling Mediterranean—should be so close to your home and the deafening noise of the city. You think back to your first outings on a motor scooter, when you rode through the city without your parents’ permission and it seemed as if it would never come to an end. Maybe it was springtime, and the light of Rome was simply splendid, and it beckoned you to venture out into the meadows that line the Appia Antica—the ancient Appian Way—or toward the Roman Forum, a perfect place to snuggle in private with your first girlfriend. If nothing else, it was a place where no one would ever think to come looking for you.
If you think back to your first evenings out in Rome, get-togethers in the Via dei Fori Imperiali—a street named after the forums of the Roman empire, where ancient Roman nobles must have made appointments to meet in their chariots—you remember that one of the reasons it was so popular was that there was plenty of room to play soccer. Because—and you smile as you think back on this detail—there was always someone who’d show up with a soccer ball in the trunk of his car. Those evenings always ended in Trastevere, where you bought slices of pizza—Roman pizza, flat and crunchy—to eat in the narrow lanes off of white paper napkins.
And you look back on the things you’ve done since you were a boy, things you still do today: eating cornetti (the Italian equivalent of a croissant, with some variations) in the middle of the night in Vicolo del Cinque in Trastevere, or in the Testaccio area; at least once a year seeing the masterpieces of Caravaggio, who wasn’t Roman by birth but who was happy to live in this city—Vocazione di San Matteo at the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and the Madonna di Loreto in the Church of Sant’Agostino; standing in line for ten minutes to get an espresso, only to toss it back in thirty seconds, at the Bar Sant’Eustachio near the Pantheon; marveling at the majesty of St. Peter’s, but also going there simply to hear Mass on a Sunday; amusing yourself by reading the improvised sonnets left by passersby at the statue of Pasquin, a variety of “Pasquinades” that rail against the current government, whatever its complexion, left wing, right wing, or middle of the road—no matter what, it’s in the wrong; and driving past the Pyramid of Cestius, which may be just a small-scale imitation of the pyramids of Nubia, but it does date all the way back to 12 BC. And to think that nearby, in the Protestant Cemetery, the mortal remains of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Antonio Gramsci and Carlo Emilio Gadda are buried. Or passing the time chatting with the usual waiter in the usual trattoria in the usual working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome, where as usual you order spaghetti alla carbonara, which, like most Roman cooking, may not be easy to digest but—let’s be honest—is better here than anywhere else on earth.
Lost in the meandering memories of your past, you relive them every day in the unchanging present, and you decide that, even if in the years to come you do go on using the Colosseum as a traffic median—and an excellent one at that—you were certainly lucky to have been born in Rome.
3
Anywhere Like Heaven
One day, during Sunday Mass in a small church near my house, as the priest read from the Gospel in a strange language midway between Spanish and Italian, I found myself thinking: How many churches are there in Rome?
Out of curiosity, I researched it on the Internet. I never did find an exact number, though one crazy person said that he had counted them all one by one and he’d come up with 230 churches.
Given the size of Rome’s historic center, it’s difficult to answer the question with any confidence—even if you’ve lived in Rome your whole life, and even if you’ve spent a good portion of that life visiting churches, either dragged there by your parents or else while taking friends visiting Rome out sightseeing.
While you’re out wandering around the city, there’s one church you really can’t avoid seeing now and again, like it or not: er Cupolone, as we Romans affectionately call it—the Big Dome. In fact, St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, built on the spot where the apostle Peter is buried, is not only a symbol of Rome around the world, it’s also an old friend for us Romans, a reassuring touchstone.
Many years ago, before terrorism became a lurking source of fear—and before you had to pass through a metal detector in order to enter St. Peter’s—any time you strolled through the city at night you always seemed to wind up, for some reason, in the very center of the immense square designed and built by Bernini. And each time, unfailingly, you experienced the same strange sensation: you felt tiny in the presence of such a majestic creation. St. Peter’s is, in fact, enormous—the largest Catholic church on earth. Until recently, there was an unwritten rule that no building should approach er Cupolone in height, much less outdo it. Times change, though, and now skyscrapers are being built even in Rome . . .
St. Peter’s is, of course, the worldwide center of Catholicism. It’s an impressive thought, even if you’re not religious. It’s practically impossible to list all the wondrous treasures it contains: marble busts, statues, tombs, tapestries, paintings, frescoes, mosaics, stuccoes. But when you walk into the basilica, the first thing you
notice is the little crowd of people on your right. That’s where the Pietà is located, which in my opinion is the most beautiful, tragic, and deeply human piece of sculpture on earth, carved by Michelangelo when he was barely twenty-four years old. The sculpture is now protected by a sheet of bulletproof glass, and has been since 1972, when a lunatic attacked it with a hammer and damaged it in several places.
In my own pilgrimages—not to holy places, but to the beaches outside Rome—I always seem to happen upon the basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura (literally, St. Paul Outside the Walls), which was built on what is traditionally thought to be the grave of St. Paul. It’s located along the Via Ostiense, near the banks of the Tiber River. This section of riverbank is now lined with famous restaurants and clubs, like the one where the famous Italian author Pier Paolo Pasolini had dinner the night he was murdered. Whenever I’m in that part of town, I try to stop by a spot we Romans like to refer to as the Three Fountains, a couple of miles from the basilica. It’s a complex of three churches and a monastery in a peaceful location just a short distance from the busy and noisy Roman thoroughfare Via Laurentina. There’s an interesting reason for the name Three Fountains. It was on this spot that St. Paul was beheaded in AD 67. According to legend, his head bounced three times, and each time, on the spot where it hit, a spring of water gushed from the soil. Those three springs, or fountains, are now commemorated by the three churches. The oldest building, the monastery, was founded in AD 625 and occupied by Greek, Benedictine, and Cistercian monks, in that order. The spread of malaria drove the occupants away, and the monastery was entrusted to the Trappist Fathers, who planted eucalyptus trees, which were thought to ward off malaria. Miraculously, even now, many centuries later, the Trappists still produce a eucalyptus-based liqueur from those trees, which they sell in a little shop in the courtyard, along with their famous chocolate and a variety of herbal remedies. The place is steeped in silence and greenery, a wonderful oasis of peace far from the traffic and clamor of the city.
Another astonishing story that my father used to tell me when I was small concerns Santa Maria Maggiore (St. Mary Major), the other papal basilica. It was built on the site where, according to local lore, a heavy and absolutely miraculous snowfall occurred on August 4, in AD 352.
A patrician aristocrat named Joannes decided, since he was childless and with the agreement of his wife, to donate all his possessions to the church and to build a basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Legend has it that the Madonna appeared to the couple during the night of August 4 in AD352, telling them that a miracle would point to the best location on which to build their church. The pope had the exact same dream, and the following day, when he walked out onto the Esquiline Hill, he found it covered with snow. He traced out the perimeter of the building on the spot in the snow. When the church was built, at the couple’s expense, it was known as the Church of St. Mary ad Nives—St. Mary of the Snows; what we see today in Santa Maria Maggiore, though, is a reconstruction dating from a later period. The Madonna della Neve—Our Lady of the Snows—is a holiday celebrated throughout Italy on August 5. She is the patron saint of some forty Italian cities and towns. And every year in August, it rains white petals in Rome. What would Bernini, buried in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, think of it?
With all this abundant excess of churches, it should come as no surprise that people in Rome, more than elsewhere, use an expression that involves no fewer than seven: the famous giro delle sette chiese—the circuit of the seven churches. When Romans talk about “making the circuit of the seven churches,” they are evoking the idea of going the long way around, or making a circuitous detour before managing to achieve something. It was only after I grew up that I happened to ask myself what the seven churches in question might be and why every Roman, including me, refers to them from time to time. I discovered that the circuit of the seven churches actually was an ancient pilgrimage “circuit.” St. Philip Neri decreed in 1540 that a pilgrim visiting Rome should pray in no fewer than seven churches, the main ecclesiastical institutions of the time, on a single day, Good Friday . . . and of course the only way to do that was on foot! I challenge you to find me even one Roman who has visited all seven of them, even once, in the course of a lifetime—much less on foot, rather than by car.
And just which seven churches are they? Aside from the four patriarchal basilicas—that is, St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, St. Paul Outside the Walls, and St. Mary Major—there were St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, near the Verano monumental cemetery, the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and lastly St. Sebastian Outside the Walls, near the catacombs of St. Sebastian, not far from the Appia Antica.
But Rome has its modern churches as well. One winter Sunday I satisfied my curiosity about one of them. A few years ago, there had been quite a firestorm of controversy over the design and construction of a new church in an outlying working-class section of Rome, Tor Tre Teste. The city government had hired a big name in contemporary architecture, Richard Meier, to design and build it. Meier had won a sort of competition well ahead of the Great Jubilee of 2000, and the cornerstone was laid in 1998; however, the Jubilee Church, also known as the Church of God Our Merciful Father, was not completed until well after the Jubilee, in 2003. It is, to use the Italian expression, a cattedrale nel deserto, a “cathedral in the desert,” located in the middle of a dense and fairly anonymous urban quarter. Meier, who also designed the controversial travertine and glass shell that contains the Ara Pacis—the emperor Augustus’s Altar of Peace—on the banks of the Tiber, has created an impressive and intriguing building: three enormous, self-supporting white concrete vaults, the highest of the three reaching up eighty-five feet. Direct sunlight never penetrates the interior of the church, save for a single moment in the afternoon, when a shaft of light angles through a small window, illuminating the crucifix inside.
What can I say? It’s a lovely church. But when I think back to St. Peter’s and the most famous dome on earth . . .
4
Long Ago and Far Away
What I’ve described to you so far is the Rome that every Roman gets to know as he grows up and comes to appreciate the beauties and the treasures that his city has to offer. But as a child, little Luca Spaghetti had very different interests.
The centerpiece in the life of every Italian bambino is probably Sunday. In fact, I remember the Sundays of my childhood as a succession of celebrations, in the sense that almost everything that happened on Sunday struck me as a special event. Saturday nights I would drop off to sleep already dreaming of awakening the following day, because that meant one thing that never happened during the week: I’d get to play soccer in the morning.
Of course, before I could unleash my energy and virtuoso soccer skills on the parish church’s pozzolana ash soccer field, one obligatory rite of passage for every child on Sunday morning was Holy Mass at ten a.m.—a Mass held especially for the children. To be honest, we would happily have skipped the Mass, considering our yearning to play, but we basically underwent the ritual in a fairly good-natured manner. If nothing else, it was one way for all the junior soccer players to get together at a specific time near the field. There was another benefit: since we all sat together in the pews, during the homily we could already get started on the crucial task of dividing up into teams.
Once Mass was over, we gave free rein to our obsession with soccer, and a horde of yelling children surged onto a parish soccer field that was certainly far too small to accommodate all of us—because every child that had attended Mass had the right to play in the soccer match, even if they were terrible soccer players. And so the Sunday match involved rows of midget players, as many as thirty to a side. As if that weren’t enough, each of us wore a jersey of a different color.
When the referee whistled the start of play, the army of midget players rushed off in pursuit of the soccer ball like a swarm of crazed bees. The soccer ball was usually a Super Tele, a round piece of plastic that behaved more or less like a kite in even a lig
ht breeze—completely impossible to control. Ricochets and rebounds were unpredictable on a soccer field that had pitfalls of all kinds: plane trees forty feet tall along the foul lines; depressions, boulders, and hills that made the terrain varied and treacherous. There was also a tremendous low limestone wall about a foot tall around the field. Behind one goal with rusted uprights there was a fifteen-foot-high wall; behind the other goal, with even rustier uprights, there was a very tall net that was evidently meant to protect the windows of the neighboring houses. That’s what it was supposed to do, anyway . . .
I remember games in which I never got to touch the ball at all: all I managed to do was get a mouthful of dust kicked up by the other players as they skidded and swerved across the pozzolana ash with moves worthy of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. As often as not, once the swarm of players had overrun me, I would stand—or lie—there, counting the fallen bodies of the other injured players as the dirt cloud dissipated.
Some of the players, more ruthless and less willing to work hard than the others, would simply line up along the opposing team’s goal, trusting in blind fate to arrange for the ball to roll or bounce, by chance, to their feet, so they could then turn and quickly, easily score a goal. When that happened, the celebrations would go on for as long as fifteen minutes, and it became quite a challenge to get the game started again.
These games usually ended when the parents showed up, one after another, to take their sons home, or when that week’s referee officially decreed it was time for lunch.
Lunchtime, of course, was fundamental. Around one o’clock, the children all scattered down the various streets of our neighborhood, hurrying the short distance home. During the trip, I always looked longingly at the wonderful, mouthwatering sign of the neighborhood pastry shop, because Sunday lunch always involved pastries—what we called pastarelle. There was always a long line in the pastry shop, because everyone always hurried in just before one o’clock to make sure they would enjoy the privilege of buying pastries from the last batch, and also to make sure the pastarelle didn’t sit too long in the refrigerator at home. There is a long-standing and contentious debate about the best pastarella format. Some are in favor of the mignon. Those who prefer that smaller format may just be especially gluttonous for sweets, and so they like to be able to sample the largest number of varieties, under the illusion that they’re limiting their intake of calories. Then there are those—like me—who prefer the large format, the true pastarella. When you take your first bite, there is an unmistakable explosion of cream filling in your mouth. No one can resist the pastarella, even people who aren’t especially fond of sweets, and the pastries we ate on Sundays really did have the flavor of a special occasion.
Un Amico Italiano Page 3