The journal is part of what I am calling My Year of Pilgrimage: Around the World in 60 Days. It began with a reunion of the Claps (yes that’s the spelling) in Rochester New York in July (more on that later). Now I am off to Europe, the Middle East and Asia re-visiting many places I have been many times as a tour guide and individual traveler, partly by sea and partly by land. These “essays” will be more staccato like notes than usual.
I must have been to Rome a dozen of so times over the years, which is only a miniscule fraction of the time Rome has been here. This time I can’t say with any certainty when I will return, but I am confident that Rome will be waiting if I do. An old prophecy from the Dark Ages states: “While the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, the world shall fall.” The Coliseum seems to be holding up better than me. Rome is “the Eternal city.”
Curiously, the waiter at dinner last night, far more than affecting an affinity designed to enhance his tip (I think), after ascertaining my pedigree included Abruzzese, volunteered “Io vecchio.” He didn’t look all that vecchio to me and I countered. “No, Io vecchio,” as I indeed did feel thanks to the cobble-induced aching in my legs.
How old are you? I asked in Italian. “Seisante uno,” he said, trying to make the number with his fingers.
“I am ten years more,” I replied. Charitably he protested and said that I wasn’t that ancient. I wish I could have recalled all of Lorenzo di Medici’s apposite carpe diem
quatrain to quote to him in reply:
Quant’ e’ bella giovenezza (How sweet youth is)
Che si fugge tuttaria (Yet it flies from us)
Chi vuol esser lieto sin; (If you wish to be happy, be happy now)
Di doman’ non c’e’ certezza (There is no certainty of tomorrow)
The pizza was delicious, Neopolitan style, the way pizza is supposed to be.
This time I flew to Rome on a Lufthansa from Frankfurt. In “Roman times” I would have been entering from the North through the Flaminian Gate. I was seated next to Guan Wen Feng, a young businessman from Fukien. When I greeted him with a “nihao” he brightened and asked if I had been to China. We chatted for most of he flight, speckled with as many Mandarin words and phrases as I could recollect, as his colleagues (he was with a group of 30 co-conferees) leaned over from nearby seats to catch what the American da bi ze had to say. They would be touring Rome, Venice and Florence.
It was a harbinger of my next new discovery of Rome—the legions of Chinese and other Asian tourists taking photos of each other in front of the Pantheon, the Trevi, in the Foro Romano, in Piazza Navona and Piazza di Spagna. They seemed remarkably at ease, obviously not intimidated by the high prices in Euros, fashionably dressed and un-gawkish in their role as emissaries and consumers from what might become the world’s biggest economy. They are the “un-barbaros” and it’s their turn at the empire game.
What do these visitors from the world’s oldest constant civilization think of a city that, as G.B. Shaw remarked, “makes its livelihood by exposing the bones on its dead grandmother to strangers.” The Chinese, as best as I have been able to discover, would never leave old ruins sticking out of the ground the way Rome does. Even though many of them might be making their known pilgrimage to the source of imperial Christianity, a faith many have adopted, but to them bizarrely celebrates the execution of its leader in word and symbol. But their interest in their new faith seems predominantly supplicative, drawing them by the West’s success with the fusion of Christianity and Capitalism. They are a stark contrast with Africa’s refuges seeking any purchase of economic gain hawking pashminas, name brand knock-offs, and the latest souvenir cheap toy, a balloon that splats into a pukey mess and then amazingly reforms into a sphere. (I did not see a single person buy one of these ephemeral wonders.)
Rome knows that the bones of its dead grandmother continue to pay dividends. It is certainly what this pilgrim desires—all the ruins in their decrepit splendor and proper places so that I can navigate now more from memory that map my way among them. They seem like old friends since many of my own memories have seeped into their cracks and crevices. I read my Gibbon and Graves but, in fact, in one of those curious quirks of memory, I have retained clear clips of an episode of Dr. Kildare from the 1950s in which Kildare (Chamberlin) falls for an Italian beauty (Daniella Bianchi) and, indelibly, the melody and some of the lyrics of what has long been an obscure song have stayed with me. Here’s a couplet of lyrics:
You may leave, but Rome will never leave you/
Rome will always be inside your heart.
I first discovered Rome with Patty, awed by the feeling that I already knew the city, that I belonged. We both came from the era of “Hollywood on the Tiber,” of Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain, the post-war Rome that seemed all gaiety and possibility, while the Romans knew better the irony of La Dolce Vita and La Strada. As with our encounters with all cities we all create our own private Rome (think Keats, or Cellini). I remember 1979 when Lisa was sick and Patty stayed with her in the old palazzo in via Sistina that is aptly occupied by Les Soeurs de Lourdes. I took Laura out for a little tour and we re-enacted the scene from Roman Holiday with our hands in the mouth of the Boca della Verita at the Church of the Cosmedin, and Laura posed on one of the vacant pedestals of the Vestal Virgins in the Foro Romano (although I did not fully explain the back story of either).
Which sort of segues to the subject of Roman women. The lore of the Eastern Med is that Circassian and Yemeni were most sought after for their unsurpassed beauty to supply the Sultan’s seraglio. Maybe. Because in this beholder’s eye Rome has more beautiful women—in greater variety of pulchritude—than any place on the planet. Hey, call it Italo-ethnocentrism. See for yourself. It still applies.
The explanation I came by many years earlier is that the Roman legions brought back the most fetching slaves from their conquests of the known world to add to the Roman gene pool. Over the centuries these permutations of physical features have produced some of the most alluring and enchanting faces and figures anywhere. Only the fact that Rome never conquered Ire leaves something out. (I should add that women tell me that this might also apply to Roman men.)
But there is more than mere physiology to the matter. Roman women might also be the most urbane in the world. It takes a confident urbanity to wear the most fashionable Ferragamo pumps into those treacherous Roman slick, cobbled streets, checking the latest fashions in shop windows, gesturing, wielding a cell phone, all with a balletic grace. These are traits that seem to combine and communicate a sense of “this is who I am (and implied “deal with it”) and a simmering eroticism. Think first Magnani, then Loren, Cardinale, Lolobrigida and Vitti.
Finally, Roman women have the advantage of Roman fashion design. Indeed the shop windows in the via Condotti and environs still display the most elegant raiment befitting the beauty Roman women. No wonder then that it the eternal streets one can still hear the appreciative male uttering the contemporary equivalent of that of his ancient predecessor: “Dea, certe!” (She is certainly a goddess!)
So I say as the Romans say.
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© 2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.14.2011)