Rome: Piranesi

The Canopus

If you're a creature of routine you probably prefer cities that can be mapped out on a grid. Rome or for that matter Paris and London perplex you. You prefer your straight lines and coordinates of the kind you can plot on old-fashioned graph paper. Symmetry is a religion that brings with it a certainty that those who seek to believe in something can grasp. Is god geometric? Rome is inured in belief. Even atheist members of Rome's once exuberant Communist party (which eventually repudiated Marxist-Leninism and evolved into the PDS or Democratic Party of the Left) was bathed in edifices of belief. Ubiquitous churches make up for the charmed confusion of this rendezvous with antiquity.

listen to Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

 and also listen "Mr. Pitiful" by Otis Redding