Rome Journal III: The Janiculum Hill

View from the Gianicolo (photograph by Hallie Cohen)

Janus Films was the company that originally produced the Ingmar Bergman movies you watched in the 60’s (now Bergman films are distributed by Criterion). There was a famous Janus film logo that created a frisson whenever you saw it since you knew that it was going to introduce say the famous trilogy Winter Lights, Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence. Janus, the two faced God, after which the company was named is also the provenance of Rome’s Janiculum Hill or Gianicolo (as it's called in Italian) on which can be found several other kinds of cultural institutions including the Spanish Academy in Rome and the American Academy in Rome,  which occupies the auspicious McKim, Mead, neo Renaissance building near the top. Toward the very summit, cars zigzag wildly around an arch which contains the Museo della Repubblica Romana e della memoria garibaldina. There are many other cultural wonders on the Janiculum including San Pietro in Montorio which contains the Templetto, the tomb designed by the Italian Renaissance architect Donato Bramante, at the purported location of the martyrdom of St. Peter. The Janiculum is not one of the seven hills of Rome (though it's the second highest, it lies outside the borders of the city proper) but from the gardens of the Villa Aurelia which is now also part of the American Academy you can see all of Rome. In 1849 the Janiculum was the site from which Garibaldi successfully fought of the invading French army. One of the streets leading to the top is the Via Garibaldi. The Janiculum descends right into Trastevere, the artistic and bohemian neighborhood full of winding streets that contain its own set of wonders including Saint Cecilia in Trastevere, with Stefano Maderno’s famous and highly realistic sculpture of the writhing martyr replete with axe marks on her neck.  

Rome Journal II: Sunday in the Piazza With Giorgio

photograph by Hallie Cohen

It’s a cool Sunday in January and you want to get from Via Marconi, at the edge of the EUR, to the Piazza Tommaso de Cristoforis. You walk down to the Marconi Metro stop of the B line whose last stop Rebibbia is one of Rome’s prisons. Laurentina is the last station in the other direction. Unlike most of Rome’s Metro system, which is underground, Marconi is outside like the els running through the Bronx and Brooklyn. But as you look up you don’t find the counterpart to New York’s tenements, but remnants of the Mussolini style fascist housing which is now occupied by its own well-heeled class of inhabitants. Huge trees seem to sprout up out of nowhere; it’s a little like Stuyvesant town where once modest dwellings now attract wealthier residents. You stay on the B for eleven stops, Basilica s. Paolo, Garbatella, Piramide, Circo Massimo, Colosseo, Cavour, Termini, Castro Preforio, Policlinico, Bologna and finally Tiburtina F. s (which is one of Rome’s train terminals). The names cite familiar tourist attractions, but it’s Sunday and the train has its own demographics which includes a priest with a loosened collar champeroning a group of teenaged girls and a young woman attending to her two dogs. At Tiburtina you switch to the 545, five stops in the direction S. Luca Evangelista, through an industrialized section of Rome to the dramatic archway overlooking a housing complex in an otherwise more modest part of town. Rome’s subways are clean and punctual, unlike the MTA and even their engineers occupy spacious compartments. But, though cozy, the buses on Sunday can be few and far between and you shiver in the cold as darkness falls and you wait in a shelter craning to look for headlights on the deserted streets. You stare up longingly at the chinks of light coming through shuddered windows with their intimations of a protective warmth that now eludes you.

Rome Journal I: The Whores of Rome

"Death of the Virgin" by Caravaggio (c.1606)

In ancient times Rome was a palace of debauchery. Gore Vidal wrote the script for Caligula, the story of the emperor who epitomized the debauchery that was Rome. In Mamma Roma, Pier Paolo Pasolini tells the tragic story of a retired prostitute who seeks to better herself and the life of her son. Indeed, the poverty of post-war Rome forced many women into prostitution. But today Rome’s primary business is tourism and as you negotiate your way through the buses of American, German and Japanese tourists who flock to the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla and the famed wedding cake, (the monument to Victor Emmanuel II), there’s nary prostitute in sight. Where are the whores of Rome? Well here is a comment on TripAdvisor written by a guest who stayed at a hotel on the Viale Guglielmo Marconi in the EUR, the area where Mussolini built his fascist housing  (remember that scene in Mamma Roma where Anna Magnani goes to locate one of her old sex worker friends in a similar part of town?): “THERE ARE PROSTITUTES ALL UP AND DOWN THE AVENUE!!! SO as you are walking back from the metro to your hotel you are bombarded by women with bras showing and butt cheeks hanging out. I was horrified and immediately felt unsafe.” In an article in The Guardian (“Rome red light district given green light,” 2/7/15) a neighborhood organizer named Cristina Lattanzi, who has lobbied for restrictions and who originally spoke to La Repubblica is quoted thusly, “Eur is already the city’s red light district with more than 20 streets under siege day and night. There are streets for transvestites, streets for very young girls, streets for male prostitution. Us residents need a bit of peace.” So Rome hasn’t really changed since ancient times. It’s just that the prostitutes have merely moved from the great monuments of antiquity, where they once openly plied their trade, to a different part of town.When in Rome...but even in Rome whores today are not what they used to be.

 

Creed

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) says a couple of good things to his protégé Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) in Creed. One of them occurs when Adonis is poised in a mirror readying himself to shadowbox. Rocky says, “See that guy staring at you. That’s your toughest opponent.” The rest of the film is pap and no match for instance for films like The Fighter, David O Russell’s portrait of the great Mickey Ward or masterpieces like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, which told the story of Jake LaMotta. Here Ryan  Coogler, who directed, relies on pat melodrama. Rocky is diagnosed with non Hodgkins lymphoma as young Adonis, who turns out to be the illegitimate son of the legendary Apollo, steps up to the plate against a seasoned opponent, "Pretty" Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). Are Rocky and Adonis up for the fight, respectively for and of their lives? But the real question is the fight. You have boxers and fighters, those who are hard to catch (the boring undefeated Floyd Mayweather epitomizes the former) and those who like to mix up like Tyson,  Foreman Frazier, Hagler and Hearns. Adonis is portrayed as green. He’s had 15 fights in Mexico, but only one real win in a sanctioned bout and he has his work cut out for him in fighting a world champ. To begin with, in reality, such an improbable matchup would never happen. Even considering Adonis’ pedigree, the veteran would have too much to lose in such an upset—even considering that the character in the movie is on his way to prison where he’ll be serving a long jail term. But putting boxing promotion aside, it’s really hard to understand what makes these the two Sammy’s run. Adonis starts off looking like a boxer and his opponent is definitely a classic brawler, but by the end of the fight it’s just the story of Adonis waking up in the middle of a tremendous beating to become the fighter he's meant to be. It’s a great idea. Send a mildly talented fighter in the ring against a master and hope something will be ignited. But what would the great Cus D’Amato have advised? What Creed portrays is manslaughter.

The Lost Continent of Miami

  Atlantis (the Bahamas)

Nothing is really wrong in Florida. Life goes on as usual, but if you read Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent New Yorker article it sounds a little like Miamians, at least, may one day awaken to find themselves in danger of becoming The Lost Continent of Atlantis or even worse Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (“The Siege of Miami,” The New Yorker, 12/21/15). Were the developers of one of the big Bahamanian resorts being unwitting Cassandras when they named their property, Atlantis? The usual rejoinder to jeremiads about global warming and rising water levels due to melting ice on the poles is that Venice and Amsterdam have been below sea level for years, but Kolbert takes that into consideration too, as she deals with the particular structure of what lies under Miami’s seemingly or not so seemingly livable conditions (in the article she describes traveling to certain areas of Miami which suffer from chronic flooding). But let’s imagine what Miami would be like under water. People places like South Beach go to trendy oxygen bars so it wouldn’t be a very big stretch to have them swimming around with aqualungs, which themselves have to be regularly tested for TB. The notion of selling air is in fact no longer quaint as we’ve seen from the reports about the smog in Peking which has people purchasing canisters of fresh air off the same racks that they buy their bottled water. Life goes on and people will frequent the Mandarin Oriental or The Fontainebleau, even if they're six feet under. You’ll have water locks which let you into your room and when you go to a bar called the Mermaid, a comely woman bartender wearing a mask will take her snorkel out of her mouth to ask what you're going to have. Miami will be like a big water park. You’ll visit it the way you do the Coney Island aquarium, only instead of fish floating in the tank, you’ll find people.