An ancient view on Rome.
rome, various years
faces in stone, Rome, 2006.
The Protestant Cemetery from THE ITALIAN HOURS by HENRY JAMES
“I recently spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close to St. Paul’s Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome - although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of our looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave. The cemetery nestles in an angle of the city wall, and the older graves are sheltered by a mass of ancient brickwork, through whose narrow loopholes you peep at the wide purple of the Campagna. Shelley’s grave is here, buried in roses - a happy grave every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves - that of Keats, among them - with an effect of poetic justice. It is a wonderful confusion of mortality and a grim enough admonition of our helpless promiscuity in the crucible of time. But the most touching element of all is the appeal of the pious English inscriptions among all these Roman memories; touching because of their universal expression of that trouble within trouble, misfortune in a foreign land. Something special stirs the heart through the fine Scriptural language in which everything is recorded. The echoes of massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged suggest nothing more majestic and monumental. I may seem unduly to refine, but the injunction to the reader in the monument to Miss Bathurst, drowned in the Tiber in1824, “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who lies beneath thy feet in death was the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom”, affects us irresistibly as a case for tears on the spot. The whole elaborate inscription indeed says something over and beyond all it does say. The English have the reputation of being the most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that one does n’t constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular faculty to “gush”? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already lost her husband by a most mysterious visitation. The appeal to one’s attention and the confidence in it are withal most moving. The whole record has an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic. You seem to hear the garrulity of passionate grief.”
More Rome in black and white, 2006, 2008, 2010.
On the Aventine and in the Borghese Gardens in Rome, 2008, 2010, black and white film.
On the Aventine at the English Cemetery in Rome, 2008 & 2010.
Obvious
invisible circus (rome at night)
Have you always listened to the tick tock fever pitch of your heart when walking in the Roman alleyways? Have eyes followed you around every corner?
I want to go down this alley with you. I want to see where we end up. Sooner or later we’ll part, for we all do, but let’s turn and twist awhile, let’s follow the invisible circus’ insistent rhythms. The Strong Man, the Bearded Lady, the Dwarves, the Painted Horses, The Fire Eaters, the Trapeze Artists, the Freaks, the Carnivale Women, the Caramel Apple Man, the Sad Faced Clowns, the Elephants, the Monkeys, the Musician with eyes that undress us, the Knife Thrower and his Assistant, the Man with the Tophat, the Liontamer, the Lion, the Ostrich, the Peacock, the Double-Jointed Sitar Player, the Fortune Tellar, the Gypsies… Let’s dance with them! To their intangible beats, to the long since passed echoes. I still feel life in these rocks bleeding out for us. Giving it another go. Entertain us! Entertain us! I still feel his eyes on us, undressing us, calling to us; I see the tarot cards laid out, I see different paths diverging at opposite sides of the table for us, I hear the clang of her silver earings, I hear the bells chime in a hundred church towers all at once. I smell the animal’s fur, I hear the smoldering, purring growl breaking into night. I hear the clowns laughter clogged with tears. Pancake makeup streaked grey, red and black. Forming rivers of impatient color around our feet. I only need to hear your voice singing ancient songs we cannot translate and you’ll save me from going off into this invisble circus for good. But the music rises, the memories crowd me into a corner, I need to move, to get out, to keep going, to keep moving, to rise to the occasion and be someone else. One self does not satisfy me. I don’t satisfy me.
(2001)
(I took this photograph in Rome in 2008, Nikon Film 100, Englishman’s Cemetery, Aventine)
a solitary espresso on capri
The solitary espresso in Capri, sitting at the tiny, empty cafe in silent awe of a small funeral procession rounding the corner before me and stopping beneath the 15th century church only several feet from me in the small piazza. I wanted to know them, but secretly. - 1999
That moment stretched on into a dream state. I felt completely a tourista,
a witness, some mute observer.
The hearse stopped it’s movement and the mourners got out of the miniature vehicle to cross themselves below the church and exchange tiny ball-like yellow flowers. The casket was carried by solemn pallbearers and the family followed them down the steps out of the old church. I sat and stared, afraid to move and shatter this peek into
such an intimate moment: this ceremony of death, of mourning, of burial.
The church bell rang precisely at that moment and its eerie, hollow ringing
sounded forlorn in the wind. The casket was carried into the back of the
Italian hearse and the family entered the car. Some of the mourners walked
up a cobble stoned road up to Anacapri in the same direction of the hearse.
I wanted to follow them, to see further into their traditions, into their lives.
I wanted to pack my belongings, or to give them up entirely and stay in Italia and never leave. I wanted to live in some simple little flat and open Dutch windows every morning and breathe in the warm Italian sun and eat fresh oranges and lemons before a long walk in the green country side or a stroll on the seaside. I wanted to take photographs of faces and eyes of real people… people who were alive, who were unapologetically themselves. I wanted an old fashioned black typewriter to write on and to type out strange stories.
I wanted to make love in white sheets, in a white room with wooden floors that creaked. I wanted to learn how to make Roman artichokes and aubergenes and lather olive oil on my hair and face and body at night and take honey baths in a large white old tub. I wanted to dance in a black dress with red hair in a piazza while Italian jazz musicians or wild-eyed gypsy’s played reminiscent tunes and I felt like the barefoot Contessa. I wanted the world to be cinematic but real in only the way a movie
could appear real. I wanted to wake in a foreign land with another language on the tip of my tongue and a new day, very different from any I had known before, ahead of me. I wanted the impossible. I wanted the dream. But sometimes dreams spring forth into fruition.
Dispatch from the Grand Flora, Rome, Italy. (If only life could be like this more often…)
This morning we landed in Rome. It’s been a whirlwind ever since. (March 2010)
It’s past midnight and I’m sipping Carpene Malvolti prosecco bellinis from the chic little wine bar Gran Caffe Roma on Via V. Veneto & eating complimentary Peyrano chocolates from the hotel. We drove from the airport to the hotel, spying the coliseum and the baths of caracalla which I captured with my tiny spy video camera. I want to have a slow food, slow pleasure kind of trip here. This is all an experimentation, an adventure, a letting go, and a following of some creative pull at my dusty writer’s hand, my photographer’s eye. I have loved the possibilities of a digital world in the early days of the internet so I (for better or WORSE) have decided between the ‘living simply in the moments kind of moments’ I’m going to tweet, poster-ous post, ‘tumbl’, facebook my time in Rome. For myself because I love history, I’ve always wanted to keep a true travelogue of sorts & because my memories meld all together some times & I want some small record of the moments which stood out to me or changed me. I want to know I was alive. I dreamed. I even managed to chase a passion or two in my life. And finally, I have a friend or two who have requested a “what’s it like to be in Italy in 2010 when you are plugged in globally, live with mobile phones, iphone applications, internet, cameras & video? What’s it like to wander down a charming, beautifully lit, slightly overwhelming Roman cobblestoned street? What is it like to be an American in the Eternal City? What makes you return again and again? What do you see there? And how will it change you?
(2010)
48 hours from the eternal city
Downloading/uploading Rome 2010/2012
So I’m flying to Rome for the 7th time in 12 years on Friday & 2010 is the year I will be finally, completely ‘plugged in’. I bought my $60 international iPhone plan so I don’t return home with a $1,000 bill updating on facebook, “I’m in the coliseum” or tweeting, “I’m walking in the footsteps of Caesar” or talking to someone back home in between the penne alla arrabiata and the prosecco while staring at the Pantheon on my iPhone. We’ll be re-watching the ROME series on Itunes on the laptop in the room at the Grand Flora at night and listening to audio guide tours on our iPods of the Roman Forum and the Vatican while we’re there on the very spots and watching Rick Steve’s video podcast tours of Naples, in Naples and I’ll use my nano video iPod to take in the moment movies files to upload to a myriad of social networking sites of the view from the Amalfi Coast or a Neapolitan making the perfect espresso in some family run bar/cafe. Plugged in, tuned in, uploading, downloading, hooked into two worlds: the ancient and the 21st century. It just keeps getting easier. And yet I just keep feeling hungrier.
I’ve always wanted to record a trip something akin to Anais Nin or a travelogue to savor later because my memory can be terrible at times but I never ever commit to pen and paper. Maybe in all this digital madness I can somehow ‘taste life twice, once in the moment and once in retrospection’. Not for bragging rights, but for posterity & to prove to myself my own existence. And to maybe become a writer again. I miss it. I miss you.
(Written in March 2010 before I left for Rome. This March, 2012, I will return to Rome armed with a newer faster iphone and I hope a new nikon dslr (to accompany my film one as my digital camera is old and broken). I’ll also be videoing here and there on my phone and “instagraming” #igersrome #igersitaly).
This upcoming visit will be my 8th to Italy since 1998.
softness & moonlight
Very hot bubble bath with a good book (hardcover Secrets Of Rome) & exceedingly chilled Italian champagne. The taste of fruit is still in my mouth. Annihilated after a hot day in the Italian sun walking through grand palazzos and the ruins of the past. The air chokes me. I hide in the room, a tiny, lovely oasis. He reads about Caesar, I read about the ancients & a 1960s murder on Via Puccini. I can smell the sweet magnolia trees through the balcony windows wafting in from the Borghese gardens, a few paces from where I sit, writing to you.
(Marzo, 2010, Roma, Italia)
Happy New Year!!!! (Taken with instagram)
