August 2008

Online Exclusive: Papal Disney

Each month web editor William Bernhard herds a poem into this spot & gets the poet who wrote it & who published in Poetry Northwest to discuss its inception. This month we give the space over to William, just back from a summer of wandering in Rome as an American poet abroad. DB

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Wandering inside the old part of the Eternal City it’s easy to find yourself wobbling like a newborn calf along 2000-year-old buckling, cobblestone streets that mangle and blister your feet while Roman women whiz by unfazed in high heels; these labyrinthine avenues ball together like disorderly branches; even Ariadne’s steely thread wouldn’t be much of a navigational aid.

Getting lost in Rome was an almost daily occurrence for me this past June and July—I was there participating in the University of Washington's summer Creative Writing program, which is directed by poet Richard Kenney. Being used to Seattle’s tidy grid, I was often disoriented by the zigzagging buildings suturing ruins and various walled off excavations; if you were to roll up the streets of Rome like sod you’d find a whole city buried beneath them. Further adding to the disorientation was this feeling of stalled time, and the city's public clocks enforced this idea: I had to know which ones actually worked in order to keep track of the current time. What really seemed to bind everything together was the daily repetition of marginally cooler mornings (always announced by rioting swallows and gulls), lunch time, siesta to sit out the broiling afternoons, and evening (announced again by rioting gulls and swallows), which is when Rome seems to wiggle awake.

In the 15th century Rome was not the city I often imagined it to be. Its population numbered around forty-thousand, which was less than a twentieth of its size during Nero’s reign (54 - 68 AD). The city was filled with woods and wildlife. You stood as much a chance of being gored by a wild boar as you would tripping over some chunk of weed covered marble. Alberto de’ Alberti laments the decay of the Eternal City in a letter he wrote in March of 1444:

Much of this decay was brought about by a financial vortex created during the Papacy’s relocation to Avignon from 1378 - 1417, which ended when Pope Gregory the X1 returned to Rome at the urging of St. Catherine of Sienna who wrote to him, “do not delay, then, your coming. Do not believe the devil, who perceives his own loss, and so exerts himself to rob you of your possessions in order that you may lose your love and charity and our coming be hindered.” Later Pope Nicholas V, who reigned from 1447 - 1455, tired of the trash piles, shanties, and rubble that was Rome decided that if the city was going to inspire strong religious faith it needed to be inspiring itself. He desired “majestic buildings, lasting memorials, witnesses to their faith planted on earth as if by the hand of God.”

In a sense he wanted to create the Disneyland of Christianity. And so, in accordance with the Pope’s decree, new buildings began to appear.

These included a rebuilt Vatican Palace, Senatorial Palace, and a new basilica to replace the sagging St. Peter’s. Over 2,500 wagon loads of stone pilfered from the Colosseum went into its construction. Nicholas joined a long line of Roman recyclers and re-assemblers.The reconstruction of St. Peter’s and the “Disneyfying” of Rome are apt metaphors for how it exits today. To some degree they sum up part of my experience when I lived there.

Layer-upon-layer of civilization collides at street-level. Baroque and Renaissance buildings site comfortably next to more modern ones. At the base of any building you might find some remains of ancient Rome scattered in a fenced off yard. On the main avenues chaotic armadas of taxis and Vespas weave between endless bus-loads of camera wielding tourists. Every time I waded into this torrent of traffic it seemed that only will and fate guided me safely to the opposite sidewalk. Only once did I come close to being hit by a black Mercedes. Its well-coifed driver didn’t flinch and the Armani suited man in the back talking on his cellphone didn’t even seem to notice the six inches between me and the car’s hot grill. Moments like these made easy to imagine what it was like to be a citizen during the Republican or Imperial eras, when dodging wagons, sliding blocks of marble, grumpy centurions, and pickpockets in order to make it to across any given street were part of any given day’s survival game. Not much seems to have changed since then. Today “centurions” lurk in front of the Vittorio Emanuel II memorial, a Neo-Classical travesty Romans have dubbed “the wedding cake.” In between smoking and text-messaging, they pose for photographs with tourists. Pickpockets are everywhere, and the drivers seem remarkably unconcerned as to whether they squash you or not.

As an American it can be difficult to parse the condensed layers of time exposed in Rome; I’d never encountered so much antiquity incorporated onto the daily stage (one of our oldest landmarks in Seattle is the 90-year-old Smith tower, which seems quaint when compared to, say, the Pantheon!). Several examples immediately pop into my mind: Every evening the Piazza’s fill with Romans as they have for centuries—it’s too hot to stay indoors. They debate, smoke cigarette after cigarette, drink big bottles of Peroni, and eat gelato while gathered around a fountain that was erected by some forgotten pope. At the end of each night the piazzas are littered with the evenings cigarette butts, empty bottles, napkins, and other forms of detritus. Every morning orange suited street cleaners armed with brooms, hoses, and their own cigarettes clean up the previous night’s disaster so that the siege can be repeated once the sun goes down. One night I wandered around the outside of the Colosseum which seems like a enormous zoetrope; in one archway a guitarist stood above an array of effects pedals, and tore away at Brian May’s guitar solo from Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” while a karaoke-esque version of the song blared away in the background through one of his two battery powered amplifiers. In another archway a man chipped one of the Colosseum’s stones with a small hammer. In another a couple pressed themselves against the iron bars to peer into the unlit interior. On another night, while lost at 1:30 in the morning, I stumbled across the blinking lights and twinkling music of a New Age encampment inside the enormous park that marks the remains of the Circus Maximus, which was built by the Etruscans and expanded upon by many Roman emperors. Silhouettes of people sat on folding chairs or reclined on shadowy blankets listening to some unseen man speaking dulcetly through a P.A. Everyday I walked by the bones of Hadrian’s Market and Trajan’s Forum. It would be easy to mistake these archaeological artifacts for replica’s or even fakes.

After all, in Las Vegas you can visit the Luxor’s manufactured Egyptian ruins inside their glass and steel pyramid. And its within the vicinity of a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Disney has its manufactured worlds of Epcot and the Magic Kingdom. In Washington State there’s an “authentic” Bavarian village nestled in the Cascades. These familiar, accessible, and ultimately “hyper-real” icons can make it difficult for American tourists--I mean, me even--to reconcile the manufactured spectacle of those places with, say, the actual Egyptian columns supporting the Pantheon or the obelisk of Ramses II which stands in the center of Piazza del Popolo. More than once I overheard some of my fellow countrymen remark, “this is like Disneyland.” But that’s too easy of a place for the mind, even if you’re being whizzed through Rome inside a crowded double-decker bus and are given a minimal amount of time to explore. The city seems to demand more. I’m glad I stayed there for a month, even if I felt like I only caught a glimpse of it.

My last night in Rome happened to coincide with a stage of the Miss Italia 2008 contest happening in Piazza del Popolo (“Piazza of the People”). According to Google’s translation, the winner of the contest was going to be judged, “Miss You Smile Card Rome.” Performances in Piazza del Popolo are free and my friends and I decided that somehow this one was an appropriate capstone to our trip. We threaded our way from Piazza Navona, without getting lost, to the Via Di Ripetta, which is one of the three barge-sized streets of “the trident” visitors would have seen “back in the day” when they first entered Rome through the Porta Flamina. Today this entryway is called Porte del Popolo and it opens onto Piazza del Popolo. As we neared our destination the general drone of the streets gave way to some whistled samba music that would almost be at home on any Esquivel! record. When we finally made it into the piazza we were greeted by the baritone intonations of Italian television star Carlo Conti. He was interviewing one of the swim suit clad women while she laughed and unconsciously twisted her hands like over-saturated sponges. “Musica!” he called out and she pranced her way down the catwalk to the same samba tune we had heard from afar. On either side of the stage two enormous screens titled at 45 degree angles highlighted all of her practiced moves and well executed smiles. The audience of thousands cheered. The umbrella pines behind the stage were lit red, yellow and blue by the spillage from the stage lights and looked like colorful puffs of smoke dispersing into the Borghese gardens which darkly loomed on a hill behind the stage. Public executions used to take place in the Piazza del Popolo until the mid-nineteenth century. Who knows what else used to happen there. But on this night, the women competing for “Miss You Smile Card Rome” loomed like one hundred foot tall Jumbotron apparitions smiling and dancing their way towards fame. Over and over again Conti would demand, “musica!” and some swim-suited Roman woman would buzz about the stage, suffer Conti’s interview, and hug her mama, who was always strategically planted in the front row.

We left before the contest ended and as we made our way back down Via Di Ripetta towards Piazza Navona the music hovered over the hum and growl of Roman traffic and the squalling open air bars and restaurants. The song stayed with us for a long time and I thought I could still hear the last wispy bits of it it when we reached our destination. I didn’t know what time it was. All I knew was the the moon was almost full, it was dark and humid, and I was leaving the next morning. It hadn’t taken me long to adjust to the lifestyle surrounding me: a cappucino and cornetto in the morning, siestas in the afternoon, and multi-hour dinners that never seemed to begin before 8:00. And then, of course, there were the endless archaeological sites to remind me that I would always be younger than Rome; Nicholas V’s seduction plot had worked.

~William Bernhard

Comment on this feature

 
William Bernhard is the Web Editor for Poetry Northwest.

"Papal Disney" appears exclusively on Poetry Northwest Online Subscribe today