* * *
The Milton’s address was indeed perfect—the morning was bright and the pensione sat literally across the street from the vast and green Borghese Gardens. But the tiny clerk at the ground-floor reception desk took an endless moment to open a ledger and stare down his truly Ciceronian Roman nose at the fact that we’d canceled a perfectly good reservation and had now turned up—and on Christmas morning? Where had we been? I was too flummoxed to tell him. Jim, with Socratic candor, gave a simple explanation. “Ah,” the clerk nodded, “the Nazionale.” Then he looked up, knowingly. “You enjoy your night?” We both said “No.” At last the clerk managed to release a thin-lipped smile from the depths of his heart. Then more gazing down his nose at the giant ledger before, with agonizing slowness, he entered our names.
Back we raced to the Nazionale and closed our bags. The clerk there expressed mild regret at our proposed departure; but with the now-welcome laissez-faire attitude of the establishment, he wished us well and even exchanged a few of our dollars at a favorable rate. So we splurged on a taxi for the trip back up to the peak of the Pincian Hill. All the way, we were subject to further laughing at what our eminently respectable Florentine landlady had parked us in. Could she, after all, have co-owned a brothel, well south of Florence? We almost hoped so. And of course we hadn’t departed in any sense of dudgeon, only in the hope of undisturbed sleep, good food, and a slightly less louche atmosphere than the Nazionale was offering under present management.
I noticed, the moment we entered our room, that there was no soap at the basin; and I asked about it. The bellman seemed initially surprised that we hadn’t brought our own but said cheerfully that he could walk down the street and buy it for us. We handed over the small sum and off he went. Only as we were unpacking at the Milton—in our sizable room with shared facilities down the hall—did I realize that neither Jim nor I had thought to buy even the smallest Christmas gift for one another, and a modest wave of nostalgia rose and swamped me.
This was my first Christmas absence, ever, from home. In Florence I’d bought presents for my mother and brother—an antique gold cross for Mother from the Ponte Vecchio, a leather box for Bill. In time I’d pay American Express, here by the Spanish Steps, to pack and ship them. I felt a longing to phone home and at least hear the family voices. But again the cost of transatlantic calls was huge, and in any case I’d heard nightmare stories of Italian phone service. So when Jim took a seat by our tall wide window and opened his Plato, I said I believed I’d take a long walk. We’d meet at dinnertime.
I still had no guidebook, but I set off downhill in what I thought was the general direction of the Colosseum. I’ve never known why but—on that one day, at many crossroads—there were orderly piles of pristine foodstuffs (cans, boxes, bags, even unopened boxes of panet-tone). I assumed they were set out for the poor, but no one seemed to be collecting them. Auto traffic was remarkably sparse. Instead, on foot, there were frequent middle-class Italian families, focused round their youngest child, invariably clothed (like their parents) in holiday splendor—new cap and coat, new shoes but above all the brand of adoration that Italians seemed always to reserve for the youngest.
As I reached what was plainly the center of the ancient city—I didn’t yet know it, but the Palatine Hill was rising beside me—I came on a long narrow empty piece of muddy ground with a single strand of rope on waist-high poles around the perimeter. Maybe it was meant to exclude human beings; but since there was no one in sight, I stepped across it easily and strode to the midst before I realized where I must be. This had to be the Circus Maximus; and while there were no signs of excavations in progress, the ground was strewn with smallish fragments of marble. The largest were, say, the size of a man’s head; the smallest, egg-size. Of course I was tempted to pocket a reminder—anyone could bring a bag, step over or under that one strand of rope, and take home twenty pounds of fragments uncaught. I took one piece, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, with only the most rudimentary signs of human shaping. Then I fumbled my way into a left turn and, lo, the Colosseum was there just ahead.
Even now in midafternoon, warm sunlight was bathing the city. Golden sun would be a cliché; but the light was near golden, both in color and in its value to my sun-starved mind. Yet there was almost no one else, not even a guard, in this enormous construct—one of the world’s most famous tourist magnets. The family-centered Romans were surely at their ancestral homes, and again the tourist trade had still not reached its present suffocating heights. There was even no ticket seller, no policeman to block me. With last night’s knowledge of the basic structure, I walked straight to the upper rim of the arena, went a few steps downward, and sat on a seat occupied no doubt by the butts of many generations of bloodthirsty Romans on holiday.
A few years earlier I’d developed a susceptibility to sunlight; I’d break out in hives if I spent more than an hour or so in direct exposure. But now I unbuttoned my white nylon shirt, lay well back; and what I thought of through my long Yule light-bath was not gladiators or psychopathic Caesars or my allergy to sunlight but my Carolina home—how far off I was from the roots of my life and intended work, not to mention a bereft only parent and my only near kinsman, a younger brother with whom I’d never had the least grave disagreement in our years together. I was not homesick but, if a mind can truly transport a body through space—and of course it can—I was back with all my maternal family in the rambling house in its tall oak grove in the village of Macon where I’d been born. And soon I was seated at the bountiful table of my aunt Ida, one of the very few human beings whom I loved without a trace of reservation—a secular saint, much given to both deep-diving depression and guarded laughter.
By the time I was back uphill at the Milton, it was likewise dinnertime in Rome. I can’t remember what we were served; but since it was our first chance at a good local meal, I’m glad to recall that it tastes good in memory—surely some form of domestic bird preceded by fish and followed by a complex Christmas cake and first-rate coffee—our English coffee had been so weak that, as my father said of such brews, “It needed a crutch to get out of the cup.”
Maybe all these years later, when so many young people travel early and roam far afield, it’s hard for some to imagine the unprecedented mixture of joy and sorrow I felt that single day and most of that night—joy that I was working (or at least worrying about the slowness of my work) and living on my own in entirely new territory; joy that I’d fallen in love again and sorry at all I’d left far off: family, old friends, and a landscape and culture whose urgency to me I couldn’t yet fathom. The pleasurable compound was so immensely powerful, it drove me on through many days to come—days, months, even the better part of three years—and here I’d first sensed its force in a city which, with Jerusalem and Athens, had witnessed more of the crucial thought and work of the human race than any of its newer and larger successors. No wonder I’d seek every later chance to return to Rome.
* * *
The remaining weeks there coincided with a season of early winter rain—not downpours but drizzles in the midst of fairly warm air and frequent stretches of sunlight—yet Jim and I, together and apart, availed ourselves of as much of what Rome had to offer as we could digest. The day after Christmas, when I bought the encyclopedic and very scholarly Club Italiano Tourismo guide to the city (a thick handful in easy Italian and bound in bright red cloth), I realized that this city, which was then by no means enormous, offered endless wonders. But I did my share of visits. And again we wandered on our own—nothing so corn-fed as an organized tour for us. I never left the room without my CIT guide. The fact that it was in Italian quickly improved my comfort in the language, and its thoroughness contributed greatly to our decisions on what to see and what we were seeing when we got there. The obvious first visits were imposing. We took a whole day, almost by ourselves, to roam the plentiful remains of the Forum and the (then) little-visited Palatine Hill, the cradle of the city with its memories of the twins R
omulus and Remus, legendary founders of the city.
Beyond legend, the long plateau at the present summit of the hill bore its still tangible remains of good and evil, sane and insane, and merely brilliant or incompetent emperors. Among so many sites that astonish with their survival, I retain especially deep-cut memories of my first visit to the House of Livia (the wily wife of Augustus and the malign female star of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius) and the nearby Temple of Cybele with its memories of self-castrated priests and the reputed site of the Lupercal, the cave where the twins were nurtured by a she-wolf.
After my first climb up the hill with Jim, I returned more than once—and many times in later years—in an effort to begin imagining the sheer quantity of power once contained in, and dispensed from, this single place—supremely peaceful as it is now and crowned only with Rome’s towering umbrella pines. In 1955 we’d only recently come through the now little-remembered Korean War, and the worst of Vietnam lay more than a decade ahead. What stared all American young men in the face during my draft-eligible years was Moscow and the Cold War threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction—or MAD as it was called. Nonetheless there amid the defiant survivals of imperial Rome, I harbored no thoughts of the eventual and inevitable decline of the empire which America was so half-consciously but gorily building for itself. Was that a symptom, in me, of the famous political oblivion of 1950s America or merely of my own monumental unawareness of the present dire state of world power? (the big majority of my present students, five decades later, seem at least as oblivious).
God knew, I’d been intensely conscious—for the nearly five years since I turned eighteen—that my country meant to draft me for service if I met its none-too-rigorous standards for induction; and I’d picked my way through the eggshells of the Selective Service System (never considering that my sexual tilt might disqualify me). Yet in Europe, while I never once thought of permanent exile, I felt a blind safety. Since my father’s death and given my absence from Mother’s widowed life, I wanted to feel my separation from everything meant by home; and I know that I read no American paper or magazine with anything resembling steadiness.
Another day we moved on—a few years forward in history—to the basilica of San Pietro which stands on the site of the Circus of Nero (where tradition says St. Peter was crucified) and above the foundations of the first great church completed by the emperor Constantine in A.D. 326. With my tendency to give Roman Catholics a bye in a good many matters, it’s hard for me to see a way that a sane visitor would not be impressed, if not deeply moved, by St. Peter’s with the calm spatial volumes of its vast central aisle climaxing under Michelangelo’s dome where Bernini’s spiraling bronze canopy soars above the main altar with St. Peter’s skeletal remains beneath. And against the back wall of the apse, Bernini’s towering shrine for the Chair of Peter is supported on the bronze fingertips of the prime doctors of the church—Augustine and Ambrose, Athanasius and John Chrysostom. The crowded side aisles—which begin, on the right, with Michelangelo’s exquisite first triumph, his elegant Pietà, and proceed on both sides to offer their sometimes dignified, occasionally bizarre tombs—may prove another matter for almost any visitor, especially Protestants accustomed to much less adornment of their shrines.
At the time of my first visits during that Christmas season, the adjacent Vatican palace was occupied by the austere and endlessly controversial Pius XII—was he pro-Nazi or not; did he help the Jews or not? But I never saw him, though when I walked round the roof of the basilica, I glimpsed a moving shadow at what I’d heard was his window. His skull, which was then almost all one could see of his gaunt face; his circular steel-rimmed spectacles, his unsmiling mouth—if the shadow was Pius, it never came nearer than a hundred yards’ distance.
There were plentiful other indelible sights. First was the church of San Pietro in Vincoli which displays not only the chains St. Peter wore to his upside-down crucifixion but also—in a dim side aisle as almost an afterthought—Michelangelo’s potent statue of Moses, larger than life with an unnerving resemblance to the actor Charlton Heston. When Jim and I were there, a professional photographer suddenly lit the statue for pictures; and we had the luck of seeing Moses in a way that even Michelangelo can never have seen him—almost blindingly revealed in every detail of the surface. That brilliance only served to increase the threat inherent in the biblical moment which the sculptor intended—Moses returned from Mount Sinai, with the newly revealed tables of the Law, only to find his people engaged in the worship of a golden calf.
Third was the emperor Hadrian’s enormous round tomb, Castel Sant’Angelo, gutted within by centuries of looting invaders who even disposed of Hadrian’s ashes but were powerless to destroy so enormous a monument to his virtue as a ruler. Then came Ostia, the seaport of ancient Rome which Jim and I, for some reason, were so determined to see that we actually took a train to the literally deserted site, long since beached by a gradual silting up, only to find little to see but the roofless unadorned walls of many undistinguished buildings; ruins without interesting stories attached are as lifeless as mummified dogs by the road. The short train trip however, on another gray day, was a welcome relief from the hours we’d been spending in our room—Jim with his increasingly incredible fidelity to Plato, me with Samson Agonistes and my attempt to push on with a few more paragraphs on the story which I’d commenced in Florence.
Next was the by-then-underground, the huge and almost never visited Golden House, built by the emperor Nero after the fire which destroyed much of Rome in A.D. 64. Most of the original structure, intended to cover some 125 acres, was destroyed or buried by later emperors. Still I could wander—entirely alone (no guards were present, not one other visitor and Jim was elsewhere)—through high vaulted spaces whose walls bore dozens of barely visible frescoes that had proved so enriching to painters who first saw them when the house was rediscovered late in the fifteenth century. I could linger in enormous state rooms—and briefly in the cubicles in which unimaginable crimes or lunacies at least might have occurred. Since early boyhood I’d had a revolted fascination with Nero—his bull-necked head and the history of his progression from his beginnings as a reasonably benign ruler to a ludicrous madman and eventual suicide. And here in his megalomanic palace, he began to seem so uncannily near me that, after a gloom-burdened hour, I hurried out into welcome sunlight.
* * *
Among so many other sites, those that would prove useful in later memory, there were the Borghese Gardens and groves, so serene by day, and poised just opposite our pensione. They surrounded the Galleria Borghese with—among a horde of objects too beautiful to digest—I recall most clearly (for its awfulness) Canova’s Ivory-soap vapid statue of Napoleon’s sister Pauline, Bernini’s painfully imaginative Apollo and Daphne, his truculent David, and the many sinister but beckoning Caravaggio boys. The same wooded throughways and bushes also converted, almost instantly at sundown, into the central pick-up spot for whores of all gender. In the mid-1950s, as Jim and I tested the periphery by night, the arrangements seemed more orderly—and safer—than those in a number of other Roman street fairs. You stopped your tiny Fiat or opulent Ferrari by the curb, a particular girl or boy (mostly well-dressed) approached your open passenger door; you leaned over to discuss your needs and the fee to be charged for their satisfaction; then you beckoned your hooker into the car or drove ahead to the next eager provider. Only an ancient city, surely, could have organized its sex life so relatively painlessly (for its men, of course—the darlings of all southern cultures).
The fact that I’ve postponed the Sistine Chapel till this late in my list of wonders says nothing about the extent of my response to Michelangelo’s ceiling and altarpiece. I visited the chapel more than once on that first trip; and though it had not yet undergone the highly dubious cleaning of the 1980s, I understood plainly that it was the only man-made thing I’d yet seen which was past belief in the extent of the sheer brain- and hand-power involved in the achieve
ment of such grandeur, such witnessing to a human desire to come before God with a power dangerously comparable to God’s own.
Supremely for me, though, the site that struck and moved me most powerfully—and has gone on doing so through every subsequent visit—was the Pantheon. Not only is it the best preserved of all ancient Roman buildings (its broad dome is inexplicably intact), there can never have been a structure built here—or elsewhere in all the succeeding centuries—which equals the immensity of its majesty, its passionate intent to honor its native city and the gods who sustain her, and the genius of whomever conceived its glory.
And speaking of glory and its decline, on my first visit to the Pantheon, ex-king Umberto II of Italy was there, visiting the tomb of his father. Though Umberto of Savoy had served as king for only a month, after World War II, he had continued to inspire considerable loyalty in numerous Italians. And as I stood apart and watched him at the family tomb, a woman approached him, knelt, and tried to kiss his shoes. Umberto quickly drew her upright and spoke briefly with her. The encounter left me thinking of the realities of another vanished power in such a place. Had Hadrian himself, on this spot, ever experienced such an awed tribute? And speaking of Roman mysteries, the Italian constitution of 1947 had forbidden Umberto to return to Italian soil in his lifetime. Yet several bystanders whispered to me, that morning on the spot, that the man with the wreath was Umberto; and my own acquaintance with photographs of the ex-king confirmed the fact. Had he simply come incognito to his father’s grave?
* * *
By evening our long walks up and down the city’s hills left us more than ready for the good dinner that the Milton always provided—mostly plain but delicious and served with mute elegance by men who seemed Roman to the core, dark and dignified but ready to respond to any word of thanks with a smile that was either genuine or was one more tribute to the Roman gift for perfect simulation. After the cheese and fruit, Jim and I mostly took our books back to the room or to the small lounge and read there, unless a certain pair of old women who seemed to be permanent residents were seated with their knitting and their endless low-pitched stream of complaint against life in general. I could stand about three minutes of their cranky duet; then I’d go to our room, though if I’d lingered with more patience I might have improved my Italian markedly, as well as my list of warnings against a grudging old age.
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