Rome: Meditations from the Eternal City
Reading ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius is deceptively time consuming. Accounting for all of its nuts and bolts my copy amounts to a slender 256 pages – detailing a year of Harry Potter’s adolescent antics routinely fells more than double the amount of trees. However, so laden are each of its credos, so drenched are its assertions with moral implications that range from the subtle to the seismic that my reading of it became something of an ordeal. Aurelius himself won wars in less time than it took me to actually finish it, but I recommend doing so sincerely and unreservedly. He remains among the world’s most influential philosophers and one of his assertions from that book is seldom far from my thoughts;
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
It is when I am travelling that I feel most complicit with this assertion. Perhaps nowhere as much as Rome, the city from which Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 – 180 AD. I can’t conceive of a more apt city for a man that exhumed such competent leadership and dogged philosophical logic to have presided.
However, such political nous has been in absentia in Italy’s more recent history. For reference, in the 70 years following 1946 the UK had 25 different Governments. Italy had 65. I wouldn’t envy any of them the gig given the particularly diverse charcuteria board of cultures, attitudes and prejudices that Italy presents. The old joke that in the north of Italy traffic lights are regulations, in Rome they are suggestions and in the south mere decorations is funny because it’s so true. However, one common thread running all the way from the tranquil bliss of Como in the north to the sybaritic splendour of Siciliy in the south is tourism. Rampant, unconstrained and often debilitating level of tourism.
I always thought that I understood what people meant when they described somewhere as ‘overrun with tourists.’ But I didn’t. Not until I visited the Vatican. If a queue at a bus stop or corner shop is analogous to a pokey oratory nestled in a corner of your primary school then the queue to enter the Vatican is analogous to the Vatican itself. Both are grotesquely, even obnoxiously, large although the differences are decidedly more myriad. The Holy Trinity venerated within the Vatican is prescribed by the Bible while the tourist troupe clamouring for a glimpse and an updated Facebook status were clearly more practised in the teachings of the gospel according to Mark Zuckerburg rather than his evangelical namesake. However, I stand by my point that it is a comically thick profusion of people and, particularly while navigating the Vatican museum, the experience is greatly diminished as a result.
The Vatican Museum itself has been reduced to little more than a stressful and convoluted means of herding tourists in and out of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the Sistene Chapel. It is packed with contradictory signs, inept tour guides and a series of winding corridors that are reminiscent of a Snake endgame. I have not been party to such a sickening and disheartening example of ‘tick-the-box’ tourism in my life.
This is all the more egregious given the quality of the museum’s less celebrated works. It boasts several stunning collections from a variety of ages, epochs and eras and each would likely serve as the crucible of an entire country’s tourism industry should they be situated elsewhere. Not so in Rome. Indeed, such masterpieces are reduced to mere obstacles as they are rounded, ignored and almost toppled as the hoards engage in the most lachrymose form of tourism steeplechase I’ve ever witnessed. Backpackers from Bangalore and pensioners from Pennsylvania alike harry, harass and hurry their way to the Museum’s centrepiece as if Jesus himself was awaiting them there. It’s disconcerting and turpid. It’s also terribly sad.
All the more so when you actually reach the Sistene Chapel. It’s a beautiful Chapel but a fairly ghastly experience. Guards admonish you for even considering taking a photo and in truth everyone is squeezed so tightly together that wriggling a limb free for a Kodak moment would be as noteworthy a feat as the ceiling itself. Tourists yell to family members across the room, Guards roar in turn in an attempt to maintain some level of decorum and everyone reeks of stress, frustration and exhaustion.
Perhaps only Rome can be excused for such a tourist tirade given the sheer weight of wonders within its confines. The Sistene Chapel is stunning although it can’t even claim to be the most impressive site in its own neighborhood. That honour falls to St. Peter’s Basilica – a place so imposing and illustrious that any ensemble of adjectives I choose to describe it feels hopelessly inadequate. An uncomfortable conclusion for a blogger. Juxtaposing it with the temple heavy diet I was prescribed in Asia the previous summer is perhaps as instructive as I can be. Asia offers tiny temples on the side of motorways and huge temples around which entire cities pivot. It boasts modern temples that throb with tourists and decrepit, creaking temples encased in cobwebs, laden with memories of their former glory. They are glorious and decadent, fascinating and bewildering and each manages to be unique in its own way within a continent of unique religious sites. However, none captivated me quite like St. Peter’s. None even came close.
That said, the food on offer is hardly inspiring and after a day of exploring the Vatican’s deepest recesses, the body and blood of Christ was not quite what I had in mind. Lucky enough, there’s a more varied menu on offer outside of the Vatican than within it.
I’m fortunate enough to have been to several places in Italy but not only am I regularly disappointed by the cuisine, I find this failing to be oddly proportionate to how touristy the city in question is. For me, Florence in a single image is Michelangelo’s David grimacing as he tastes a stodgy re-heated pizza. Similarly, the essence of Venice can be captured as a pushy gondolier sidling beneath the Rialto as he serves an unremarkable bowl of gnocchi with a decidedly remarkable price tag fluttering in the Venetian breeze. It is just as instructive to note that the best pizza I had in Milan was in a bar called ‘The English Football Pub’ in which each pizza was named after a footballer. I plumped for the ‘Gianfranco Zola’, the quality of which was hardly befitting of his nam
The fare in Italy’s less touristy towns is far more refined. The best pasta I’ve ever had was in Bologne while my abiding memory of Siena is of a street-side pizzeria which served slices with crusts so crisp and toppings so fresh that eating them was something of a religious experience. Mercifully, Rome is far closer to this reality than the gastro-nonsense that passes muster outside the Uffizi. Particularly so in the city’s less heralded hamlets, far away from Via Sacra and its more touristy environs. Simply put – before weighing the merits of pasta or pizza, risotto or ravioli, make sure that you are lost. Thoroughly and hopelessly lost. Mired in a world where English holds no value and TripAdvisor is rendered mute is not always advisable but in Rome it is richly rewarded. Needless to say, caution is advised if you can see the Colosseum from the kitchen – although it’s certainly a sight worth paying a premium for.
The 7 Modern Wonders of the World were chosen in 2007. Replacements for the ‘7 Ancient Wonders’ were certainly in demand given that only one of the original 7 remains to this day (the Pyramids of Giza, for those taking notes). The Colosseum is Europe’s sole representative on the updated list. As a physical structure it is, of course, extraordinary although whether that is sufficient to merit its inclusion among such illustrious company is contestable.
The ‘New7Wonders’ website is quick to extol some particularly anodyne facts when feting the Colosseum. It points out that it had a capacity ‘between 50,000 and 80,000’, that it is ‘built of concrete and sand’ and that it is ‘depicted on the Italian version of the five cent euro coin’. That’s all very well, but the actual activities it was designed to host deserve closer scrutiny if it is to be held in esteem comparable with the astonishing monument to love that is the Taj Mahal or that pearl of the Peruvian highlands, Machu Pichu.
The numbers involved are staggering. It is estimated that 400,000 people died in the Colosseum. That number includes Christians fed to lions and Jews burned alive, punishments deemed appropriate for failing to worship Roman gods. Most infamously, the number also includes gladiators from distant lands sold into a life of penury to satisfy the Roman citizenry’s bloodlust. In addition, scholars believe that 1 million animals met their end before its soaring terraces and all this after 60,000 Jewish slaves were compelled to build it.
Ancient Rome was of course remarkable for a multiplicity of reasons and in many ways the Colosseum was its focal point. Education as to Cicero’s eloquence and the democratic rigor of the Roman Republic are worthwhile but to fete the venue of the civilization’s most barbaric inclinations as a ‘Modern Wonder’ feels at best insensitive and at worst entirely ignorant as to the actual purpose of the Colosseum.
However, please don’t misconstrue my misgivings. No atrocity occurs in a vacuum and to understand, although not necessarily excuse, the Colosseum and its purpose one needs a thorough understanding of the society within which it functioned, the belief systems of the people that occupied it and the external forces acting upon them. The Colosseum is probably the best place to ignite a quest for that understanding and for that reason a visit certainly qualifies as ‘mandatory’ when in the the Italian capital.
Clearly, Rome has a lot to recommend it but even in a city with headlines as incredible as the Colosseum and St. Peter’s Basilica, it’s the footnotes that make Rome the city that it is.
It’s the quaint backstreet cafés flogging Peroni for €1 and coffee from the gods. It’s exploring the Roman Forum where Democracy held forth while you trace Caeser’s journey from consul to tyrant as he condemned said democracy to ruin. It’s the sprawling piazzas and rambling stradas that meander through centuries as readily as they do through the city itself. It’s the achingly gorgeous Trevi fountain where tourists are left agog by the absurdly arresting artistry of Nicola Salvi. It’s the mesmeric Spanish Steps, all 135 of which climb into the clouds to let you off at number 9 and float you through the oculus of the 2,000 year old Roman Pantheon, the surroundings of which teem with gelato, risotto and caffé macchiato. It’s the family-run trattoria where they work out your bill on the tablecloth and the tagliatelle is so good it’s as if Jupiter made it himself. It’s the getting lost only to stumble into a church so grand you assume it to be of particular religious significance. But it isn’t. It’s just Rome.
Indeed, the churches of Rome often have even more to offer than elaborate beauty. Daniel O’Connell, the Emancipator for whom Dublin’s main street is named, passed in 1847 and his dying wish was for his heart to be buried in Rome. To this day, while his body resides in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, his heart is buried in Sant’Agata dei Goti, a church in Rome which previously functioned as the chapel of the Irish College in the city.
As if we even needed it, it serves as yet another reason to visit this remarkable city.
