Check out the accompanying Rome gallery
We were last in Rome almost twenty years ago, a vividly remembered Rome that we scarcely dared to imagine might be still awaiting us. Memory hallows, and those months at the American Academy couldn’t have been more golden and honeyed, both at the time and in our oft-recited recollections since then. Rome, of course, couldn’t care less, and in the vast timescale that the city encompasses, we’re transient specks. This is not all bad: anonymity carries its own sense of freedom. This time around we had a sense of being outsiders looking in, a sense that was amplified by the fact that Duston tested positive for Covid within days of our arrival, necessitating our having to be far more guarded than usual in our excursions and interactions.
That sense of being a mere atom was neatly encapsulated by Maxxi, the big newish museum of 21st century art in the Flaminio district, designed by Zaha Hadid. I've been following her architecture for many years, although I'd never actually seen one of her projects in person. Each time I saw photos or videos I was struck by how strangely sterile and clinical they looked. Impossible curves snaking around each other, resolving into stretchy vectored surfaces, the stuff of algorithmic fantasy. Any time people appeared in one of the photos they looked like anomalies, little molecules of pollution sullying the purity and integrity of the design program.
And so it was for me at Maxxi. The entire place makes grandiose pronouncements: “I am Important. I am Playful. I am the product of a Brilliant Mind.” The exhibits within were appropriately major (Alvar Aalto being the main attraction), but betrayed somewhat by displays that drew attention to themselves and away from the work. All the while there was a pervasive kling-klang of percussive noise, some metastasized avant-garde banging and chiming that ricocheted around the breathless curves. The source of the cacophony was an ensemble of large metallic "instruments," with digital controllers managing the algorithms that prompted the klangs and the klings. All the instruments were fabricated from repurposed AK-47s (mainly) and assorted other firearms. Plowshares! Ah, an ironic recontextualization! Now I felt not only like flotsam, but also quite guilty for having loathed this music from the instant I first heard it.
Which is all too bad, because I quite like Zaha Hadid. Not her work, but her as a person. I base my admittedly flimsy assessment of her all entirely on a single episode of "Desert Island Disks" which once featured her as a guest. She came across as human and earthy, she chose great tunes (I can't remember a single one of them) and she had a wheezy just-folksness to her. She talked about her girlhood in Beirut, her bourgeoise family, the shirts (or was it dresses (or was it nested dolls)) that she played with. How could all these austere exercises in computerized drollery emanate from her? These days, of course, they emanate from her studio—her prodigious consumption of cigarettes did her in ages ago.
The irony of her work now lies in the ascendancy of AI. Any 15 year old architectural aspirant (or bored stoner) can issue diktats that send the regenerative engines scurrying to do their bidding. And the fantastical creations that billow forth, whimsical and playful, all impossible curves and stretchy vectored surfaces, all eagerly awaiting additional filigreed instructions ("Now make it shades of pink and iridescent puce and add two cantilevered balconies!") are somehow so much more interesting and compelling than anything in the Hadid oeuvre as to make her work appear as cheap early prototypes waiting to be verbally prompted into their full-blown muscular vulgarity.
We left Maxxi mildly dispirited but at least basking in the schadenfreude one enjoys when one has toppled a giant to one's own satisfaction. Back onto the tram, from its quaint, shabby little European sidewalk platform. When we pulled into Flaminio, a pitched battle was raging between two small groups of howling antagonists. Slogans were chanted, fists were shaken in the air. Lit flares were introduced to the conversation and thrown at the enemy. Passersby either ignored them, or stood smiling indulgently. Our darling boys, so devoted to their football teams. So passionate.
I ranged daily from our hotel near the Piazza della Repubblica, a neighborhood replete with splendors spanning the very ancient (the Baths of Diocletian) to the stylishly contemporary (Termini, the main train station and modern design temple). Filling out the timeline, there’s the magnificent, soaring Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels (and Martyrs). I say it’s magnificent because, well, it’s inherently magnificent. Magnificence is its native state, and who am I to question that? Excepting that there’s a shitload of magnificence in Rome, and a lot of it is in the service of the Catholic Church, whose main purpose, apparently, is to bludgeon the faithful into recognizing its all-encompassing might and awesomeness. So yes, the basilica, mind blown entirely, etcetera. But what REALLY grabbed my attention there were two features that are recent additions: an incredible bust of the head of John the Baptist, decapitated and bandaged, lying on its side white and pristine, and the huge bronze doors of the basilica. Both of these were installed in the past twenty years, creations of a Polish sculptor, Igor Mitoraj. It speaks well for the church, mind you, that they would showcase such modernity so prominently at the basilica.
Adjacent to the basilica, and integral to the Baths of Diocletian complex, is the Chiostro di Michelangelo, the largest cloister I’ve ever seen (I’m not the world’s foremost expert on cloisters though). A place of meditation, the cloister walls are lined with busts. Hundreds of busts. Clearly the bust was, to the upper classes of Ancient Rome, what the selfie is to all of us in the present day. So many of them strike a deep chord in me—they are so recognizably and perishingly human—stoic, angry, humorous, kvetchy, sexy, haggard…and everything in-between. And in the middle of the cloister, near a tree filled with raucous green parrots, a fountain and the remnants of an ancient pine tree, propped up by a metal armature, with just one tenuous slim trunk still rooted in the ground. This tree was already growing when Michelangelo designed the cloister!
Above all Rome underscores and reinforces my sense of mortality. Not impending doom, but rather the tenuousness and unpredictability of it all. The glorification of death, especially violent death, and cruelty, especially rape, is pervasive. How many epic statues of warriors slaughtering their foes, or, when being slaughtered themselves, doing so heroically and nobly? How many maidens gazing wistfully, poetically, heavenward with their arms outstretched—take me, take me—as they’re about to be or are in the process of being raped? Not ravaged. Too poetic. Raped. Case in point, Bernini’s extraordinary “Rape of Persephone,” a rendering of flesh in marble that is practically uncanny (the pressure of the fingers indenting the pliable young thigh). The contours of the story revolve around the kidnapping of a young woman (okay, by a god, if you’re into those things) who is dragged to the underworld. A deal with her parents is involved. This strikes a contemporary chord. I won’t labor the point, but…Gaza?
This is a grim place to end this, perhaps, but Rome holds up a tremendous mirror which, if one chooses to gaze into it, reflects us in a light that is different to that we’re used to on a daily basis. I wonder how living Romans deal with this, how they live their lives in the context of this extraordinary in-your-face history. So maybe I’ll end this on a lighter note, with these kids who were playing a game in front of the opera house (the very opera house that saw the first performance of Tosca over a century ago).
Your photos and narrative took me back to our last trip to Rome over ten years ago which I remember fondly. I loved visiting the Maxxi even though it felt out of place in it's modernity.
Time to go back. thanks for your inspiration.
All amazing pictures