On a thoroughly unremarkable street, an utterly normal bit of Roman wall, which would be insanity everywhere else.
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth, of earth we make loam — and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away, oh that the earth which kept the earth in awe, should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw.
Just walking down the street in Rome, you pick up a sense of an ancientness which is not like other ancientness. Rome is of course old and beautiful and charming and many other things, but still it is different – even different from the old and beautiful and charming places. The Middle East is older, and generally grander and more impressive; in France everything is more beautiful – even the ruins are more beautiful; places like Ireland have a coziness which really is quite charming. But Rome is different – different even in a surprising way from every other city in Italy. It is not just that Rome is old – as I have said, the Middle East for the most part is older – it’s that Rome is garbled, wildly garbled, by having been so important for so long. It is all awry. Things have been reused in so many wild ways, by so many odd minds, that the result gives the whole place the appearance of a chess-board after little children have been playing with it: it is chaos afterwards; it no longer even looks like a proper game of chess; any chess-player knows that this is not even a remotely possible position for the pieces. In Rome it is a kind of weirdness which is in many ways ugly and disturbing – as well as beautiful and reassuring — but certainly mad. I can imagine re-using an ancient column in a building; but I would re-use it as a column, finding a place for it where it was needed to support a span. There are many such re-used columns in Rome. But there are also others that are simply used in place of bricks, built right into the middle of a wall, and no longer serving the function of a column at all, but instead the function of a curtain – an utterly wrong use for a column. And often the owner of the building will break the stucco-work to reveal the bits of antiquity inside the wall – which only contributes to the sense of insanity.
No sane non-Roman could have made a statue and put it on a base like that.
This is true for the whole city – there are arches in the brickwork where there need be no arches, chunks of carved marbles used as brick or ashlar, corbels or cornices where there is neither any need nor any imaginable need, courses of bricks laid on top of things which should never have been considered proper foundations for them. The ruins are not just old – I have seen old ruins all over, and they don’t look like these ruins. The Roman ruins are actually hard to understand – even the normal old houses of Rome which are not ruins are hard to understand. Part of it is that archaeologists and owners have peeled layers off, sometimes removing towers and additions that explained certain things that were present. But there is also a weird madness the Romans have had in using ancient fragments – a madness which I will exemplify by the pedestal of the statue of Cola di Rienzo on the Capitol, though this is only a single example, and the madness is everywhere in Rome (I will add some more pictures, but myriads more could be adduced, and in Rome the effect is produced by the ubiquity of the phenomenon). The statue, erected in 1874 at a time when Rome was not short of building materials – when in fact the quarries of Italy were producing marbles for the whole world, and when Rome the new capital was flush with capital; and particularly not short of pedestals, of which there are a thousand unused ancient ones lying around in the Forum just on the other side of the hill from the place of this statue; and yet the Romans saw fit, for this expensively commissioned bronze, to cobble together a pedestal of perhaps twenty different pieces of different types of marble, held together by brickwork, some of the pieces with clashing and elaborate decorative motifs, one of them with large legible letters of an unintelligible ancient inscription. A ten-minute stroll through the Forum could probably produce seventy or eighty tons of marble fragments which would at least match – but the Romans saw fit to do otherwise.
Wall in Trastevere right by our apartment.
And almost every single medieval Roman house contains at least some wall-fragment built in a similar insane way. Walking through (very medieval) Trastevere we could see them – bricks that don’t match, columns inserted into walls, marble fragments stuck into place; Catherine espied what looked like a marble mouse built into a wall, but not in an obvious place, in a place that was neither ornamental nor out of the way, as if a parent had asked a child where to put the mouse in the wall, and the child had responded in a way to make the parent regret the offer, putting it in the least artful place possible. The art of it, one might say, consists precisely in the utter artlessness of it.
And it’s not that the Romans needed to use, or believed in using, every fragment available to them: everywhere there are more bits of antiquity to be had. Broken bits lie in the vestibule of all the old churches; all over the Forum and Palatine and all the “archeological” areas; whenever a pit is dug in Rome some piece of something is turned up.
It all contributes to a sense of Rome as irrational and callous, even ferocious: to leave the beauties of the past so utterly to chance and caprice, to reuse them utterly without reverence; to take the noble dust of Alexander to stop a bung-hole.
Column in Trastevere
Part of the Pons Aemilius, built in the 2nd century B.C. but then often repaired. The closer you look, the more insane it appears.
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