The Burgess Shale

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

On the Palatine, it's not difficult to imagine the lifestyles of the rich and imperious, to re-dress the crumbling brick walls in marble and populate the stairs and arches with elegant Romans. You can see them nibbling on snacks, or drifting around the fountains, or idly discussing the races going on in the Circus Maximus below. It was a hot day when we were there (they all were), and the cool breeze skating over the hilltop made it very clear why emperors would choose to live there. I was particularly excited to see — to be shown, really, by adfamiliares and her constant companion, the Blue Guide — the newly opened House of Augustus (almost humble, by comparison with later additions), the foundations of an Iron Age hut village, a shallow pool with islands in the shape of Amazon shields, and an octagonal labyrinth-cum-impluvium.

In the Antiquarium (the museum on the Palatine), we were both amazed to come across the Alexamenos Graffito, uncovered in 1857 in the paedagogium (a training school for court pages). It shows a man gazing at a donkey-headed man on a cross, and is captioned, in untidy scratches, "ALEXAMENOS WORSHIPS HIS GOD." It is thought to be the earliest depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus, as well as a pretty funny illustration of the mockery early Christians dealt with. (I tried to get a picture, but it's just scratches in plaster; you can see it on Wikipedia.)

( Cut for palatial photos! )

The full set is here.

Monday, June 29 - Rome

A few blocks east of the Colosseum is the Basilica of San Clemente, a beautiful 11th-century church, sunk nineteen steps below street level, with a nice cloister and a lavishly decorated interior: a half-dome apse done in gleaming gold mosaic, a Cosmatesque mosaic floor, Renaissance frescoes on the walls. It's one of the few places in Rome where photography is not permitted, I'm afraid, but it's from the same mold as Santa Maria in Trastevere. The anchor (or "mariner's cross") of Clement's supposed martyrdom is everywhere.

Then, off the northern aisle, stairs lead down. They take you past fragments of inscriptions to the second church, below the church, the 4th-century basilica San Clemente was built on top of (or at least the bottom half of it). The floor of the church above is the ceiling of the church below. The air is cool and damp, the lighting dim and blue. What were once the aisles of the church are now long, low corridors of stone that echo with whispers and the distant sound of water. There's a dry, shallow basin in the floor, perhaps an early baptismal font. An altar crouches in golden light. On the walls are some of the finest early medieval frescoes extant.¹ The lower church is quiet, and mysterious, and heavy with time.

Then, beyond the tomb of Saint Cyril (all covered in Cyrillic), stairs lead down. They take you to the first-century neighborhood the 4th-century church was built on top of. The floor of the church above is the ceiling of the buildings below. The corridors are confusing, the tufa walls are rough. Inside a row of apartments is a Mithraeum (a temple to the Persian sun-god Mithras), deliberately cavelike, with a vaulted stone roof above a carved altar surrounded by stone couches and a niche containing an icon of the god. Across a narrow alley is a house that belonged to Flavius Clemens — Pope Clement himself, or perhaps the owner of the slave who would become Pope Clement? As you push on through his claustrophobic house, paying careful attention to the superimposed floor plans in the Blue Book, you come at last to the third church, the church below the churches, the tiny room where first-century Christians used to live and invite their friends to secret services. A spring rushes along behind a break in the wall, burbling over rocks the way it's been doing for two thousand years, and you can reach in and fill your cupped hands with cold water. It's pure and fresh and faintly sweet — the best water in Rome.

The apartments themselves were built on pre-imperial Republican foundations — but the stairs leading down from there end at the unexcavated floor, so that's as deep as you can go. It's forty feet back up to street level, and you recapitulate two thousand years of the growth of Christianity as you climb.

( A few external shots and font geekery within! )

¹ My favorite tells the story of the pagan Sisinius, who followed his wife to a meeting of Christians, in the hopes of reporting Pope Clement to the Roman authorities. He was struck blind and deaf for his treachery. Clement, being saintly and all, healed him, but Sisinius still told his servants to arrest him. They were, naturally, struck blind as well, and grabbed and arrested the stone pillars instead, while Sisinius egged them on: the inscription reads, "Go on, you sons of whores! Pull, pull away, Gosmari and Albertel! You, Carvoncelle, get behind with a lever!" This is the earliest known inscription in Italian, rather than Latin.

Friday, June 26 - Rome

Before I got to Rome, I had this naïve idea that I would find historical treasures on every street corner — that I wouldn't be able to swing a cat without striking an ancient temple or the site of some early Christian miracle. I talked myself down — I would, of course, see plenty of old stuff, but it would be in museums, or walled off behind ticketed turnstiles. Rome is a modern city. You can't just leave things lying around, after all.

I should have listened to myself.

Every street in Rome is a museum. I guess I said that before, but it's true enough to say twice. During our first lunch, I could have leaned out and rested my elbow on a broken pillar from the Portico of Octavia (c. 27 B.C.). Our long muggy walk from the train station to our hotel took us past the Circus Maximus, now home to joggers. In the shadow of the Pantheon we found the church where Galileo recanted, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva; in front of it, an elephant designed by Bernini carried one of the obelisks Domitian Diocletian brought back from Egypt (obelisk erected c. 570 B.C., brought to Rome c. 300 A.D., elephanted c. 1667 A.D.). Historical eras are meshed like the teeth of combs — sometimes literally, like the pillars of a 2200-year-old temple used to support the wall of a 1000-year-old church (San Nicola in Carcere; see below the cut) — in borrowed stones and overlapping architectures. The city & the city & the city.

Above you can see artwork by street artist Enzo Condelli, stacked up on the façade of Santa Caterina dei Funari, which was built in the 1560s. On our first day, I was charmed by the bold splashes of new color against the aging white façade of the old church; on our last day, we bought one as a souvenir, and a second as a present for my mom. ( Click for more photos of the city as palimpsest. )

As usual, this complete set of photos is up on Flickr, and as I add new sets they will go into my Italy 2009 collection.

Whatever could they be saying? Lend the ancients your voice! (We are aided by the fact that it is impossible to identify whatever the standing guy is holding due to missing tesserae.)

Friday, 6/26 - Rome

On our first day in Rome, in the midst of trying to keep ourselves up for 30 hours straight to stave off jet lag, we headed down the street from our hotel to see the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. (Trastevere, where we stayed, is a region of Rome across the Tiber from the rest of Rome: Trastevere = trans-tiber-y.) It is (may be) the first place, ever, where mass was openly celebrated, and the first church dedicated to Mary the Mother of God. Above, you can see part of the 12th-century mosaic on the façade, which is apparently the earliest iconic representation of Mary nursing. (Edit: Downsampling is unkind to mosaics; I recommend clicking on the picture, then clicking the "All sizes" button on the Flickr page to see it larger.)

Pope Callixtus (maybe) founded the church in the 3rd century, and Pope Innocent II rebuilt it in the 12th. Both of them are (supposedly) buried in the church. You can see Mini Innocent II kneeling at Mary's feet, above.

( More miraculous pictures within! )

My complete set of Santa Maria in Trastevere photos is up on Flickr, and as I add new sets they will go into my Italy 2009 collection.

Tuesday, June 30 - Rome

I got teary-eyed when I saw the Laocoön. Couldn't move. It's one of the most beautiful things ever created by humans, in my book — muscular and graceful, solid and dynamic, perfectly geometrically balanced. It somehow manages to be bitterly tragic and breathtaking at the same time, poised right on the cusp between human pain and aesthetics. And it utterly refutes the idea that art and the fantastic can't coexist, since it's really just a standard scene from a monster movie (Attack of the Killer Sea Serpents!). This was a bit of a pilgrimage for me — I'd wanted to see it for years and years — and as tour groups came and went like surf in front of me I stood in the Laocoön's alcove in the sunny Cortile Ottagono, smiling and crying.

If you don't know the story: The fellow with the beard is Laocoön, the priest who warned Troy about the Trojan horse ("Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"). Even though Troy ignored the warning, Athena (or perhaps Apollo, or Poseidon) sent sea snakes to kill him and his sons as punishment. The sculpture was dug up in 1506 near Nero's Domus Aurea (which we'd tromped all over the day previous), and it quickly became the very first acquisition of the Vatican Museums. For a long time, Laocoön's right arm was missing; it was displayed with a 16th-century replacement, heroically outstretched and holding a loop of the serpent at bay. Then, in 1906, his (possibly) real arm was found in a marble yard: bent backwards, submissive, still straining but hopeless.

( More worshipful photos under here. )

I'm returning to normal after the whirlwind grandeur of Italy: a rag soaked in glory, then wrung out. But the imprint lingers — I feel more spacious, somehow, as though my chest is filled with all the vaulted spaces of all the cathedrals we were so small in. I'm bigger on the inside. Fragments of gold leaf and mosaic glint in the corners of my closed eyes. I think being in a foreign country, where I had to strain to capture meaning, where I could never just bumble along complacently but had to be always alert, made me more permeable to the avalanche of images and sensations we experienced. I feel tattooed, in layers, like a palimpsest.

I haven't yet slept a night at home without waking up convinced that I was sleeping in some historical site — my bedroom having become the Medici Chapel or the Vatican Museum, and me an interloper. Where's the bathroom? Are we allowed to be here? What can I touch? Usually only I have these waking delusions, but adfamiliares has shared them at least once, which makes me wonder if it's a common experience. Do we both see the same unreal room? Could we stay there together, if we didn't wake up?

I came home with over 1700 photos. Posting them, and writing up my Italian experiences, will be the work of a summer, so expect them in dribs and drabs over the next couple of months.

Home safe, but nearly not quite. Thanks to some bad timing, too much breakfast, and a very cautious driver on the Leonardo Express, the ticket gate was closed when we got to the airport. (At Fiumicino, there is a separate ticket line for each flight.) The woman there couldn't log into Delta's system to print our boarding passes, so she sent us to security with nothing more than the wrinkled itinerary we'd printed out before leaving. One laid-back security dude and a lot of Amazing Race-style running later, we made it to the gate, got scolded for being late, and joined the back of the boarding line. We ended up with a row of three seats all to ourselves, and had quite a nice flight, with tiny ice cream cones.

Fortune was on our side: the plane was delayed 20 minutes, and we had no bags to check. If either of those things were not true, we'd still be in Italy. As it is, we're home, and awaiting the delivery of our cat.

Greetings from the last capital of Rome. Ravenna is a much quieter town than Rome or Florence — you get the sense that the Byzantine Empire washed over it in the 5th century, depositing mosaics on all the churches like tidewrack, then things pretty much stopped happening here. (Except for Dante being exiled — and eventually buried — here. In his mausoleum hangs a lamp fueled in perpetuity by Florentine oil, sent by the city in penance for exiling him.) The mosaics are truly beautiful, though, and well worth the visit. I'll post pictures, but pictures can't do justice to the feeling of being surrounded by, wrapped in, embedded in chips of brilliant color and radiant gold, as bright today as they were 1400 years ago. Seen close, the chips of glass break up into crude cartoons and chunky Halloween masks, but as you step back they become graceful and fluid, and the mosaic faces become as expressive as painted ones. In the Basilica San Francesco, where they raised the floor several times due to flooding, you can peer through a dark hole below the altar to see the original mosaic floor. By dropping a 50 cent piece into a slot, you can illuminate it to see the goldfish swimming among the pillars.

In S. Apollinare Nuovo, a church founded by Theodoric the Goth, we were admiring the mosaics when a tour group of unprepossessing seniors, in pastel shirts and knee-length shorts, suddenly broke into choral song. It filled the church like light, all the vaulted glittering spaces suddenly resonant, the sound so big and so fitting that we thought for a moment someone had turned on a hidden sound system.

I sing the praises of the caffè shakerato: espresso shaken with ice, like a Bond martini, and poured into a martini glass with a foam of pure coffee on top. I sing the praises of Coca-Cola made with sugar instead of corn syrup. I sing the praises of the bus system of Rome, with its signs at every stop showing every stop that every bus that stops there has made and will make, and when that bus starts and stops running, and (sometimes) when the next bus is due, and how many stops away it is. I sing the praises of public springs, spilling endless streams of cold pure water from the corners of buildings and taps in the street, for filling water bottles or cooling hot hands and faces.

Take notes, America.