Rome Journal: Bus Stop

Truffaut wrote The Last Metro and that means of transport is a defining character of Parisian life, just as London is hard to imagine without it’s Underground, famous as a refuge during the bombing of Britain. Rome has a subway called the Metropolitana, but it doesn’t pervade the city the way the Metro and the Underground do in Paris and London. There are really just three lines in Rome, the A, B and the C and they seem like imposters who have come late to the show. If you want to experience the life of the populace, commuting back and forth from work, regaling themselves on weekends or sneaking off for afternoon trysts then you have to ride the buses. A central point of convergence for many bus lines in Rome is Roma Termini, where a huge lot of buses sits in the shadow of the spare modernist structure outside the train station that’s several blocks down from the Piazza Repubblica. On a winter’s night the riders queue up, huddling in the darkness, waiting impatiently for their particular bus to come. There are signposts which list the numbers of the buses with the lines of passengers diminishing as the buses come for those going to each individual destination, leaving increasingly fewer straphangers behind. Standing on line for a bus at Termini might bring back the feeling of being a small child waiting to be picked up by a parent who's perpetually late--as the knot of those classmates left behind grows smaller and smaller.

Rome Journal: Last Tango?

Cultural mythologies are created by movies and books. For instance there was the Rome of Fellini’s  La dolce vita (1960) filled with itinerant intellectuals, who chased after women with large cleavages. A whole generation of Italian actors amongst them Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni came to prominence typecast for these roles. These were a little more than kin and less than kind, fallen aristocrats, high class hookers or both. And there was the more down at your heels world which Fellini immortalized in Le notti di Cabiria (1957) in which his wife Giulietta Masina played a lady of the night, who had fallen on hard times. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the director the infamous masterpiece of degradation, Salo (1975), and who knew the Roman underworld, was commissioned to write the dialogue. Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (2013) paid homage to Fellini's Rome, particularly with respect to the parody of outsized artistic personalities. But does the old Rome with its glamorous white telephones and squalid desperation still exist? Corrupt politicians like Berlusconi might have fit the bill, but he ultimately lacked the profound glamour of a 60's Italian film star. In some senses Rome has become a bit like New York. The world’s oldest profession still plies its trade out in the E.U.R. the area on the outskirts which was the site of the aborted l942 World’s Fair and the futuristic Palazzo della Civilta Italiana. However Rome itself has lost a certain color, as well as danger and despair. Though you are still warned to watch out for pickpockets, Rome is not the wide open city it once was. Of course you pay a price for the fleshpot. It was an Italian who directed Last Tango in Paris (1972), but he might easily have called it Last Tango in Rome.

Rome Journal: Mi Ricordo Mamma Roma

 painting by Hallie Cohen

Memory cards and gigabytes are the lingua franca of our culture. A computer may have beat Gary Kasparov at chess, but Rome is a city where memories are made and no electronic instrument can compete with the remembrances it weaves. Many Americans may never have heard of it but Pasolini’s Mamma Roma is a mythic film about the eternal city that Italians generally revere; it’s a filmic national anthem. The movie tells the story of an aging prostitute (Anna Magnani) who returns to post war Rome to make a new life for herself and her son (Ettore Garofolo). Since l962, when the film was released, many of the locations have taken on an iconic significance. Today lovers of the film make pilgrimages to locations like the Piazza Tommaso de Cristoforis on the outskirts of Rome to see the arched entrance to a housing complex, the very threshold through which Pasolini’s character journeys as she attempts to fulfill her aspirations for a better life. The original scene frozen in time by the camera, competes with the first time the shot is emblazoned on the viewer’s consciousness. Aqueduct Park is another location which plays an important role in the film in that case linking the ancient Roman aqueducts to the sterile modernity of Mussolini era housing.  As one returns to the Mecca of sights and sounds which originally inspired the creation of the film and which themselves continue to evolve in real time, the past is literally competing with the present. Rome, bathed as it is in antiquities, is obviously a director’s paradise, but it’s also like a haunting dream with memories of memories weaving a fabric, a hall of mirrors in which the walker in the city revisits his or her own past.

Rome Journal: Raphael's Tomb

Raphael's tomb (photograph by Hallie Cohen)

“ILLE HIC EST RAFFAEL TIMUIT QUO SOSPITE VINCI RERUM MAGRA PARENS ET MORIENTE MORI” (“Here lies Raphael, by whom Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared that she herself would die”) are the words of the 16th century scholar Cardinal Bembo, inscribed on Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon. Raphael had planned that he would be interred in the part of the Pantheon where the final rays of daylight from the 27 foot in diameter Oculus fall on his tomb. Lorenzetto's "Madonna del Sasso" ("Madonna of the Rock") which stands above his tomb was also his idea. Of course it’s the perfect convergence of engineering and design that tourists come to see in the famed dome of the Pantheon, a perfect hemisphere on a cylindrical base. But Raphael is a hard act to follow if you're considering making funeral arrangements. Man plans and God laughs goes the old saw. However, Raphael plainly got the last laugh. One thinks of great works of art as being immortal, but the search for immortality has always eluded men. Carracci is also buried in The Pantheon, but Raphael’s triumph, in this case, lies in the way he orchestrated his own memorial, embedding himself in what Stendhal once described as "the greatest monument to Roman antiquity," the pagan temple that became a Christian church.

Rome Journal: La Basilica di S. Maria sopra Minerva

Michelangelo sculpture in Basilica di S. Maria sopra Minerva (photograph by Hallie Cohen)

The Basilica di S. Maria sopra Minerva, the only remaining Gothic cathedral in Rome, was celebrating its last mass of the day shortly after dusk. A choir singing "Oh Holy Night" peeled through the vaulted arches. The streets were filled with the usual sightseers to the Pantheon which is right around the corner. Minerva is the home to priceless works of art, amongst them Filippino Lippi’s “Annunciation With St. Thomas of Aquino," Bernini’s “Memorial to Maria Raggi,” which turns marble into the illusion of fabric and Michelangelo’s “Statue of the Redeemer”—not to speak of the fact that Fra Angelico is buried there. But what is most astonishing is the totally inauspicious façade which belies the treasures to be found within. It’s a metaphor for something, though one isn’t totally sure what. Rome certainly gets its cards on the table, a walking and talking historical theme park. But sopra Minerva is like that soft spoken kid who turns out to be a genius or the shy wallflower with the wondrous soul. Hidden beauty is the theme here along with the notion of the play within the play or invisible worlds which lurk beneath the surface of everyday reality. Perhaps the real significance lies in the word sanctuary which means sacred place. What’s sacred is that which is enduring, but it’s not always what’s immediately visible to the eye.