Rome. The City of Constructs.

View of Rome, from Unsplash

I'm on Via del Circo Massimo. The ruins of the old Rome are to my left. Down where nowadays there's only a vast green field was once the biggest stadium in the whole world. Chariot races were held here to glorify the power of the Roman Empire. The size of Circo Massimo feels overwhelming even to the modern eye. More than six football pitches could easily fit in it. Some 800 meters further, in another iconic site, slaves, rare animals, and war prisoners had been sacrificed in the name of panem et circenses principle. Some two millennia later more than 7 million people visit the Colosseum every year. How many of them fully comprehend the real purpose this building once served? I know I hardly do. It seems that with Ridley Scott's Gladiator the Colosseum has grown to symbolize the fight against the oppressive power rather than this power itself. Yet the opposite is true. The thing is, though, as I came to realize, Rome isn't as interested in depicting reality as it is in constructing one.

To my right is the monument to Giuseppe Mazzini. The wind is throwing occasional trash around. A paper bag with McDonald's logo. A used napkin. An empty plastic bottle. Mazzini was one of the ideologues of the unification of Italy yet nowadays Rome, or rather Roman people, have little respect or care for him.

This is a typical sight in the eternal city.

A couple of hours earlier I was at San Pietro in Montorio, a little church on Gianicolo. In its courtyard hides the ultimate example of Renaissance architecture - Bramante's Tempietto. The piazza before the entrance to the church is covered in rubbish, there are empty prosecco bottles in the corners, and the stairs leading up to the place smell of piss.

Rome is a city full of beauty, of artworks hidden on every corner and in every other courtyard. Yet it is also full of dirt, trash, ugliness, and neglect.

In 2020, during the initial lockdown, I was staying in the Centocello neighborhood far from the center of Rome. When we were finally allowed to take longer walks in the nearby streets I used to stroll Viale Palmiro Togliatti to get groceries. It's a big street - wide and separated by a green zone with a pedestrian and bicycle trail in the middle. It was in April and the grass was already pretty tall. After a couple of weeks, I realized no one was cutting grass in Rome. But that wasn't the problem. In the middle of May, when it got really hot, and the grass was already partially dried up, it was finally cut. A sea of trash was revealed in its place - used face masks, empty plastic bottles, packages, and takeaway paper bags from McDonald's. All of it was left there for the rest of the summer (or what's more likely for the rest of time).

That's the true face of Rome for you, or at least one (significant) part of it. Rome is a city that's advertised as the home of breathtaking architecture from Ancient Rome to Renaissance to Baroque. And it's not like you've been lied to by all those travel journals. The grandeur is here. What the books, guides, and travel agents don't tell you is that no one is impressed by it here. And hardly anyone cares.

I mean, if something is eternal, why bother with all those boring time-dependent things like the environment and the heritage, and how to preserve or take care of them? What's the point?

So here I am, on Via del Circo Massimo, next to the monument to Giuseppe Mazzini, trash flying around, and I'm having an inner dialog with myself. How can I possibly explain to someone why I'm so fascinated by this particular city when there are many others that actually take care of their own history and legacy? How come I admire with such passion this place that is full of so many things we know to condemn?

Let's see...

Sorrentino and the Search for Beauty

In aesthetics, an object is considered beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aesthetic pleasure. Beauty is a quality to which positive aesthetic value is attributed, contrary to ugliness as its negative counterpart. 

But what makes us experience such aesthetic pleasure? Is it a phenomenon that’s scientifically feasible? Or is it just a product or a result of unwritten and unspoken social conventions? 

Do we value art because it is beautiful or does the fact that something is considered art make us see it as an object of beauty?

Take Basilica Papale di San Pietro. It is symmetrical, and harmonious (although quite dramatic as well), and it is an example of extraordinary craftsmanship and engineering. But do we value it so much because it is so unique and precious or because it is the main cathedral of the Catholic church?

La Grande Bellezza is Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 movie that is widely considered an ode to Rome. 

As a young writer, Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of the film, moves to Rome, besides other things, in search of grand beauty (literal translation of the name of the movie) and spends many decades there without really finding it. He catches small glimpses every now and then, but never enough to find inspiration for his second book. 

It can seem paradoxical at first. Rome, the city that holds so many renowned artistic masterpieces, doesn’t have enough beauty for one artist to be able to write. Yet if beauty is an evaluative concept, a quality that is comparable and scalable, ugliness is a necessary part of it. Without the ugly and the profane, it would be impossible to distinguish a beautiful object from any other. 

Sorrentino’s aesthetics, the trademark of his visual style, is this often exaggerated contrast between harmony and chaos, youth and old age, beauty and ugliness. His Rome is exactly like the Rome I described in the intro - historical landmarks neglected or covered in trash. 

Fontana dell'Acqua Paola, from Unsplash

La Grande Bellezza opens with a scene at the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola. A choir is singing a hymn while a tourist steps out of a bus, takes one look at the panorama of Rome, falls down on the ground, and dies. The choir carries on singing. Fontana dell'Acqua Paola is undisturbed. People die but the art is eternal. As is Rome. And neither one is bothered. 

The movie holds a collection of many such episodes where the harmony and beauty of art and architecture are contrasted with the ugliness and unpleasantness or just sheer ordinariness of humans. It makes one wonder whether beauty is even attributable to people. Can it be that it is only an ideal a human being can strive towards but never really achieve? 

There’s this one short scene in the initial part of the movie. Jep is returning home from his birthday party. As he passes a monastery, young children are observing him from behind the bars, they play around, but one girl with particularly pleasant features remains there for one moment longer, warm morning light shines on her face. For a moment it feels like a perfect capture of the grand beauty - harmonious, untouched, innocent. The nun comes and orders the kinds inside, they all proceed in, and then, in the last cut, as the children are already inside the church, we see the old nun adjusting her undergarments. The illusion is broken. The young girl from a moment ago is still breathtakingly beautiful, but the mystery, the allure of an ideal, is irreversibly gone. 

Such is the reality of beauty. 

Illusive and fleeting. 

In another example, Jep and his companion get a chance to walk through the rooms of some of the most famous and important Roman palaces, observing their historical and artistic treasures undisturbed. It’s a dream come true for millions of tourists and art lovers. Yet these palaces are still to this day someone’s home. Often a home, luxurious and overwhelmingly beautiful, but one that these families cannot afford to have anymore. So they have to leave the rooms where they spent their childhoods with their parents who are no longer on this earth and give these palaces up for a museum. This slight sense of sadness makes the whole experience bittersweet. And so another failed attempt at finding the grand beauty. 

If it can ever be found… This grand, absolute beauty, I mean.

Beauty is only a part of reality, and darkness needs to be recognized and accepted to be able to see it. Could it be that we, people, are so tempted by power, destruction, and action because the stillness and timelessness of absolute beauty are unnatural to us? And so we create disorder and accept neglect hoping for the environment to represent us better?

After all, isn’t it easier to admit one’s flaws when you observe Renaissance artworks with a distinct smell of piss in the background?

Eventually, the more you walk around the streets of Rome, the more time you spend surrounded by cities’ breathtaking, massive, and overwhelming artworks and architecture, the more, paradoxically so, you realize that absolute beauty simply does not exist. 

At the beginning of La Grande Bellezza, there’s a quote by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. It goes: “... Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, are all imagined…” 

And so you are left amid this centuries-old grandeur. You would love to deem it eternal, built and gifted to us by Gods - to believe the ideal is possible and real. 

But it’s all a trick. A manipulation.

I always thought that if there was one place on Earth where I would become a believer, it would be Rome. After all, the church is such an integral part of this city. I hoped some deeper, hidden wisdom would be revealed to me here. I expected to experience the reality of the religious worldview at least intuitively and emotionally, if not intellectually.  

The reality turned out to be utterly different. There is no other place in the world where I felt as strongly and as confidently that God is the creation of a human mind.

Everything in this city is built by humans - every brick, every stone, every legend, every statue, and every idol. I like to think that subconsciously we all know it. Some refuse to face this knowledge because, let's be honest, do we want to face the whole scale of our abilities and of the ambition we can potentially hold and uphold? Are we ready to accept that all this breathtaking engineering and architecture was created by us when nowadays we are mostly only good for not collecting trash that the wind is throwing around all these monuments? 

We will inevitably have to face our weaknesses too. 

Some, like Jep Gambardella from La Grande Bellezza, spend their whole lives trying to create something magnificent and exquisite just not see the ugliness of the empty liquor bottles next to Bramante’s Tempietto. And others will piss on it for its beauty just to make it a little less bright and a little more like them. 

So at the end of the day, Rome is a lie. But it is a conscious one, I would appeal. 

Rome is a monument not to God, or some imaginary Grand Beauty, although it sells herself like one, but to us, human beings, flawed as we might be. 

And for me, that’s one reason to love her. 

The church paradox or the grand trick

Let’s focus on tricks a bit more…

Rome is full of historical traces from various eras, of this touristic guidebooks won’t lie. There are ancient Roman ruins and roads to be found on every other step, gorgeous Renaissance palazzos, but mostly churches and predominantly Baroque chiesas and basilicas. 

It’s estimated that there are more than 900 churches in Rome, by any means more than 500. Sometimes there can be two or three all located on the same intersection. That could feel pretty dense and wasteful even, but not that Rome is bothered by it.

So, Baroque. Most people coming to Rome have at least heard of it. Remember the story about an irregularly shaped pearl? Merriam-Webster dictionary describes baroque as a style of artistic expression prevalent mostly in the 16-17th century and marked generally by the use of complex forms, bold ornamentation, and the juxtaposition of contrasting elements often conveying a sense of drama, movement, and tension. 

That is hard to deny, especially the drama part. Let’s take for example the ceilings of Chiesa del Gesù. Gold all over it, an undefiable number of moving bodies merging one into another, and dark dense clouds fighting against the light. God’s light. 

The ultimate battle. Drama. 

Trionfo del nome di Gesù, Giovan Battista Gaulli

Or take another church. Located on one such crossing, around Piazza San Bernardo, where you can see three different churches and a fountain dedicated to Moses all from one standpoint, is the Santa Maria della Vittoria, a baroque church hiding inside one of Bernini’s most recognizable sculptures - The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Golden arrows of God’s light are piercing Teresa, her gown as if moving in endless waves. The moment of religious ecstasy is captured in cold and firm stone, but it gives the effect of hotness and action.

One simple short word would explain it best. Having not just discussed Sorrentino, it would feel totally inappropriate to use it in a religious context. (Partially it still feels wrong). The word is sexy. 

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa feels sexy. 

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Lorenzo Bernini.

And there is a relatively simple explanation as to why. 

Post-Reformation 17th century marketing. 

The Reformation of the Catholic church first started in the 16th century to the north of Italy, in German and other Western-European lands, and eventually reached the papal state too. The Reformation was a complex social, cultural, and political shift. It is impossible to do it justice by explaining it in a couple of sentences. 

So bear in mind that this is a very crude simplification.

Reformation wanted the church to be humbler, simpler, and closer to people, to speak in their language both literally and figuratively. 

When in the late 16th century the papal state was faced with this inner revolution within the church one of the decisions to fight it that they came up with was: let’s make our churches bigger, grander, and more epic. 

This is how Baroque was born. Baroque churches are basically advertisements for God. They are supposed to sell old, classical God to people.

So no wonder The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa feels sexy, and no wonder there is so much gold and drama in most Roman churches. These structures and statues were supposed to convince people that their God is better and stronger than the one that Luther, Calvin, or other church reformers were advocating for. 

Understanding this, it becomes very difficult to keep up with the illusion of Rome as this sacred and eternal place, as the city of God, of the home of the Grand Beauty.

Rome has existed for centuries. But not for the reasons above.

Rome is great at creating legends and myths about itself. It has survived for so long because it is so good at it. And the thing I admire the most is that the city is unapologetically aware of it, even though the people, especially visitors hardly realize the illusion that is sold to them. 

Rome is selling itself with its cultural heritage, its art, and architecture. 

The true heritage of Rome is political, though. It has constructed not only the buildings, streets, and physical spaces within it but also the idea of the grand city itself. 

Rome is the city of constructs. Rome is a construct itself. 

So, for someone keen on studying any phenomenon, be it faith, art, or anything else, as fiction or as a narrative unit, Rome is the place to be. 

And I guess that is why I keep finding myself here again and again.