ROME AND A VILLA
or Journey to Rome; or....

## Part I

### 1. THE GREAT COLLAGE

1. **Campidoglio.** The center, you start here, among the incongruities and mad juxtapositions. "Long flights of stairs are always moving..." The two flights here side by side, at their crazy angle. The jumble of styles monstrous: stark brown lovely Aracoeli, Michelangelo's wonderful piazza, with bronze Marcus Aurelius in middle (coated with legends: when Rome falls...) The beautiful horse-tamers, the *other* twins (Rome moves in myth and symbol) and the river-gods behind, with funny/k little goddess Roma between them. In one court (Conservatori) the colossal head of Constantine, with bits of the colossal dismembered body propped up around the court: a trunk murder, but two right hands. In other court (Capitol) the river god Marforio, who used to exchange satires with Pasquin... All of it cowering under the great white pasticceria, Victor Emmanuel. Between the stairs, a little statue of Cola di Rienzo, who proclaimed himself tribune here (I348) - the spirit of Augustus - and before long was murdered in same place by same people and his head rolled down the stairs.

2. **Key-hole of the Knights of Malta, on Aventine.** A trompe-l'œil. You see through it, at precise end of covered alley of trees, the Dome of St. Peter's - a trick in space, resembling the experience in time that Rome presents. -The Dome plays other tricks too, changes size, follows you around; proclaims the center of the world.

**The experience of Rome.**

A slow sinking into *time;* always the sense of water; is not a city of the head. The slowness of entering it, the constant changing of oneself and own perspective. Grandeur also is missing, the grand spaces always have something wrong with them (Piazza San Pietro, P. del Popolo) as against rational French spacing. Via Veneto, foreigners' street, at the top of which every morning the gallopatoio is strewn with contraceptives. - *Tours... in the old day;* e non with Rome. - *Americas.* - *Gypsies in Japan.*

"Real" Rome is a thousand things; is not only the "old" part, but that is in it, is one stage. Dreamlike spaces, crowded, irrational (Pantheon, Fountain of Trevi); surprise and secretness. Is also noise, the worst in the world, and neon, ditto.

And most of all is *people.* Toughness of Romans. Everything immediate, sensual, concrete; opposite of Romantic, also of Gothic (with its yearning and striving.) See this in churches, and in crimes. The wit of Rome, its obscenity, and amiability. The songs they are singing now about Holy Year; and others.

Pasquino (a lump of ancient statue, and a 16th C. tailor) - the great satirist. And Rome's one poet: Belli. - *Political Culture of Rome.*

### 2. SOME PLACES

1. **Tortoise Fountain.** As heart of a district, the most crowded, most full of the peculiar *old* Roman poetry. Nearby is Cenci palace,

2.

with its grim story romanticized by Shelley and so many others; is really not interesting, this story, but one touch in it is: how the Romans reacted to the saving of Beatrice's younger brother - and then the stands collapsed, set up for the execution, and a good many hundred were killed. -The Portico of Ottavia. - Tortoise Fountain, beauty of it; and the Mona Lisa smile of its bronze boys. But it is the least Roman fountain. The Aqua Paola on the Janiculum, enormous, baroque, with its great feminine curves and gaping frames, and all Rome spread beneath it, is more typical of what water is to this above all cities.

2. Fountain of Trevi. (this very short.) It is all over the side of a house, fills up the whole space, with its sea-horses and fake boulders; you are in it. / Triton... move with care! ... Infidia...

3. Colosseum. a) Charming - Statius tells of day-long feast there given by Domitian and exactly what happened: goodies falling from a strig, clowns, fights of dwarfs etc etc.; in the evening, flamingoes and ladies of easy virtue, and fireworks. /As for martyrs, there is some doubt about its being there, the Christians that is; the interesting point in any case is that the lions were always refusing to eat them. b) How the Pope's nephew picked the great hole in it, to build the Farnese palace, with 4000 workmen in a day. That is how Rome fell. - The Fascist spot-light.

4. The Wicked Baths - Diocletian and Caracalla. The more trivial the purpose the more majestic the ruin (cf. Hadrian's Villa, bath passage; the theme is first taken up here.) The Baths of D. as museum. (The cruel sarcophagi.)

5. The Column of Phocas - in the Rmn Forum. Effects of light here; the strange clarity of Rmn light, tricks it plays, with vision and association. Forum is a lake of time in the middle of the city; or a voyage in itself. The Other Twins come back here: Castor and Pollux; as versus Romulus. But more than anything one thinks of what absurd lonesome column, which always showed, even when Forum was a cow pasture. The real horror of it: not that Phocas was cruel and scandalous, but that already (it was only 608) nobody knew how to make a triumphal column, so they stole this one and stuck it up and there it has stood forever, symbol of the loss of knowledge

6. Piazza Navona - queen of piazzas, tourist-ravaged, with the Fascist gap at the end of it.
(Remarks on Fascist architecture will not come en bloc as first planned, but here and there where they become appropriate.)
The old galloping gaieties here ("godless Navona") - and now the romping fury of it; colours etc. *The Rmn Sease a Cold Day.*

7. Piazza Vittorio - the great market; people here. But most of all the cats; thousands of cats; when the market folds up they take over. They are the sacred animal of Rome and they know it. Cats, cats, cats. They lie on bits of Corinthian columns, in the flower-beds,

3.

sated, not quite sleeping; one walks slowly over to a bloody package left for them from the fish-booths, scrapes a paw over it, goes back to bed among the zinnias. On a piece of ancient, are carved cabbalistic hieroglyphs.

### 3. THREE CHARACTERS: AUGUSTUS, CHRIST, NERO

You are always conscious of these three, they are the psychological bedrock; and were within 30 years of each other.

Christ you are aware of through the absence of him; he doesn't count in Rome, Christianity to take root there had to leave him out; the crucifixes could disappear overnight and not be missed. It is always his mother, who is Venus, Cybele, Astarte, Ceres; nothing changed. Only in the early mosaics you feel Christ, and it is always shocking in the general air of Rome to remember this; crucifix in S. Andrea in Quirinale.

The air was of monstrosities, miracles. Virtue and vice both monstrous. (A few short incidents from early Empire, and before.)

Christ's teabbings flowed away in the all-engulfing tradition. He does live in Rome, but otherwise: as an unmentionable mystery, with no intercessor idea (the woman, mother, does all that.)

Augustus and Nero as the great rival forces; yet really parts of the same thing, equally unpleasant and super-human. The myth in both cases: Augustus-C. di Rienzo-Mussolini; Nero and the devil, but the devil is like other criminals, a hero.

Their faces. The Augusteo. Nero's bath-tub.

## Part II. HADRIAN'S VILLA

## Part III.

Houses and

40 pp.

### SOME GENIUSES

Sometimes you think Rome was all made by accident; other times, by five or six geniuses.

Bramante. Michelangelo. Raphael. Bernini.

Palazzi: how the pagan world comes back. Villa Albani, Villa Madama.

### SOME CHURCHES

50 pp.

About eight of them, early and late, leading up to S Pietro.

Jesu as riches, worldliness; S Maria del Popolo as the great Roman surprise-box, full of the rich gay Roman madness, and the macabre, and genius (Caravaggio); S.Stefano Rotondo - very Chirico, with the tortures of saints; Baptistery of S. Giovanni (the song of the great doors) etc. S, Maria Maggiore, Xmas eve; early German Holy Year pilgrims. Some odd items: S. Alessio under his ladder etc. S.Pietro.

### MARFORIO.

15 pp.

(This a short chapter.) Water again. The peace and dangers of Rome. View from Janiculum.