ROMAN HOLIDAY

Meriem Ben Mimoun
Written By Rosalie .

Rome is an antithesis to the Paris syndrome.

Rome. There is a sun somewhere hiding, but I cannot perceive it yet behind the coldness of the stone. The heat is unbearable here. It surrounds us like a hood of suffocation, and the night has yet to rise behind the fog of an orange-lit Forum. An Indian summer. The city is quiet like a mausoleum. You can hear and feel every civilization and every stone put here. The birds fly and we watch them like Patricians used to in wait for an answer, a divine intervention to ground and lead us. 

The fabric of the flowy dress against the stone scratches the flesh like sandpaper. It’ll leave traces of Antiquity in the morning like promises of a long-gone past. Everything is romantic. Eyes are half-lidded. Legs are heavy from the early walk between statues of Saints and canonised sinners. 

Arlette Farge speaks of the sensible relationship we have with history: the capacity to touch, hear, and smell it beyond sight. If her essay mainly focuses on archivists and historians in the midst of decade-long-research, it is also true for us profanes. In Rome, history has a physicality that goes beyond ruins. Time and death (of a body or an empire) are material and stylized.

Roma, la città vecchia, la città eterna. When one goes to Rome and knows where to wander, learns how to welcome the streets like a small neighbourhood, it becomes intimate, the smallest of places, the most personal. It is more than the immensity of the Colosseum, Caesar's tomb, and the grandiose of the Trevi Fountain where Marcello goes for a swim in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Rome is an antithesis to the Paris syndrome. It is also glamourised but does not disappoint the way Paris does for the one-time visitor: Paris will often not let you see anything beyond the surface, beyond the Travel Guide recommendations. Rome is hostile but in a different way; it begs to be discovered like an ancient book or amulet; if you let yourself get lost in the streets, you’ll end up with a treasured piece of the capital’s most intimate secret. 

I went back to Rome this year and the millenary link of the city to death struck me for the first time in many visits. Thousands of years later, it still looks like a hecatomb: every monument crystallizes the death of an empire, a belief, or an era. The collection of artefacts that are kept intact in museums look like a preparation for the afterlife: faces of saints and forgotten vases that are dug from the underground. It’s a city fabricated of antiquities, forever linked to its past: traditions that persist and monuments that fail to crumble underneath the weight of years.

Had it been a Sunday, the stroll would’ve probably started in Porta Portese looking for any trinket that belonged to a past life, past hands, past love. But it’s a Tuesday and the air is thick like a bouillon so I head to the National Etruscan Museum and walk in the gardens surrounded by olive trees for a while. The contrast between the living outside flora and the frozen inside world indicates that I have somehow entered a different realm simply by passing the hallway. In the Villa Giulia, statues of Etruscans are kept in glass prisons that you can’t touch. They keep old faces and bodies intact for future memory. Where the Sarcophagus of the Spouses - the central element of the exhibition - is exposed, an installation mimics an earthquake, symbolising the passage of time and the natural catastrophes that broke the gigantic urn into hundreds of fragments that were later recomposed by the museum. 

All the traces we have from the Etruscan civilization come from hecatombs buried underground to accompany the dead to the afterlife: an existence imagined and designed for the long road to the underworld. Because memory is not enough, it needs to be kept material, whether it be a promise for return or a fear of being forgotten for what we once were. The same sentiment that made the Etruscans bury their dead surrounded by vases and offerings for the gods guides us thousands of years later to reconstruct their story: a desire to know the past, to materialize the passage of time, to not be forgotten and not forget where we come from. Perhaps also the search for a link with the untouched, the divine. The dynamic of this sentiment, unchanged though instinctive and not exactly understood, is also what shapes Roman symbolism. 

René Alleau explains that symbols (from the Greek Sumbolon) materialize the movement between the divine and the human realm. It is more than just a link between two things, a definition that has often been attributed to the term despite it being derived from another Greek word: Sundema meant to represent a human link, something material: a syntheme - if you’ll pardon the archaic term. The latter relies on an intellectual comprehension. On the contrary, a symbol has to leave a taste of the untouchable deity, something superhuman; “It is protected by being separated from the profane world”. Despite the occult penchant of Alleau’s writing, part of what he’s saying is undeniable: it is the unknown that creates the dynamic and therefore, inevitably, the symbolism. It doesn’t quite matter whether we truly understand what was meant through every amphora from the Etruscan graves as long as their supernatural force, their symbolic force (the fear of death, the link to the underworld), remains.  And this so-called force lies in being able to understand a symbol as such: to give power to something mystical and mysterious without the certitude of its efficiency. They might have been synthemes a few centuries ago but nowadays, only their symbolic nature remains: that’s the appeal. 

After filling the belly with pasta at Il Fiammifero - this is also a symbolic tradition you should indulge in - where the French accent is automatically noticed in the unsure and clumsy Italian, I headed to the Capuchin Crypt, a series of tiny chapels under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Capuccini, decorated with the skeletal remains of over 3 700 bodies believed to be of members of the Fransiscan order. As the audio guide presents the six rooms that make up the crypt through a conversation between a Capuchin friar and a knock-off visitor, the make-shift discussion goes beyond the history of the religious order to talk about the feeling that this mortuary architecture brings. When the friar asks if his interlocutor finds it morbid, the latter answers that he finds it rather comforting.

We are all flesh and bones and soon nothing will remain of the mind but the skeleton can keep living on. The crypt stands as a preparation for the voyage in the afterlife while keeping remembrance of the mind that once bore the exposed body for the living. It both crystallizes and paradoxically nullifies the idea that time gradually erodes and decays to ultimately, inevitably, destroy everything - Le temps détruit tout. Rome refuses to let time destroy everything in partaking in its game of death. If still feared, the passing, however, becomes grandiose. Antithetical to Keats' saying, time and memories in Rome never pass into nothingness; they remain for generations to come, intact or eroded but never vanishing.

Somewhere along the journey, I also stopped at the famous spot where Audrey Hepburn signed her legacy. The queue for La Bocca della Verità seems immense and insurmountable. I look at it through the anonymous heads lined up like centurions and think it lacks something of the magnificence of the camera, the black and white grandeur and glamour of it. Did I also give the occult power to transform me into a Hollywood starlet to this round face with its gaping mouth? I look like a ridiculous stickman next to it. I think it’s interesting to analyze what the monument is remembered for: does anyone really care about the Chiesa Santa Maria where it lies immobile and inflexible? I read somewhere that the disk was initially a manhole. But that’s not what matters. What matters is not even the belief that it might bite your hand if you lie but rather the faith in becoming Audrey Hepburn in her entire superb self when you put your hand between the marble lips. This sentiment somehow fills the small recluded corners of the capital. If it weren’t too far, I would’ve probably stopped at Hollywood, where you can browse between expensive vintage pictures of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Pier Paolo Pasolini to eventually come to also think of yourself as a 1960s movie star. 


“We enter Hollywood to browse vintage photos and posters for our radical chic homes where films are not only loved but hung up like a bastion of the spirit [...]  I search for a connection between me and that sexy and dissolute Rome, between them and this sweaty and unhappy Rome.“ 

The short stroll ended in Chiesa Santa Cecilia di Trastevere, a basilica built on the remains of a Roman villa. Like many monuments in the Italian capital, visiting it leads to an adventure underground. For two euros, you can wander in the crypt that holds the remains of the house that was thought to belong to Saint Cecilia, martyred around 230 AD. The legend tells that Pope Urban I consecrated the house, transforming it into a church that later became a primitive basilica in the 6th century.


It is a dark sunken labyrinth where you walk between mosaics, storage rooms for wheat, and old stones that smell of humidity. Inside the walls and the marble, it is an organism that is well and alive and not forgotten under the dirt. The church is just the surface but the past keeps living underneath it, peacefully, conserved like wine in a cell. 

It also tells the story of an evolution. The voyage in the crypt comes to an end with a Neo-Byzantine room from the 19th century surrounded by big pillars and golden mosaics: reviving the past, romanticizing it again and again. But Rome is not stuck in the nostalgia of a long-gone golden era, it rather plays with time like clay: different traditions that meet and melt and intersect in the center of all things: the 18th century facade, the 13th century mural painting of The Last Judgement and the black and white mosaics of a possible ancient thermal plant in the souterrains.

Dinner now that the sun is setting is to be had in one of the small streets of the pink and yellow neighbourhood, in a Trattoria. I do not quite remember but I think it was Modesta in her post-war pessimism in The Art of Joythat prophesied that everything that makes Italian culture will soon disappear: from the trattorias to the rural life. I do not think she was wrong - are the current tourist-attraction trattorias really equivalent to the early 20th century ones? but I think she forgot the images that words can convey with a single roll of the tongue. People pay for the rustic experience albeit the price and the authenticity. I ate kilos of pasta like it was a mighty duty and somehow felt that here too, I was paying for a metamorphosed symbol.

Think of time as something other than an abstract. You come out of Rome with the idea that it is not an ice cube that melts into liquid then evaporates into the sky with the passing seasons. You have to let it take you by the hand, embrace the mystery, the incomprehensible: fall in love again and again.  A skull, a statue, and a house are all both materializations of time and ramparts to it: they are both syntheme and symbol: a link to the organic realm that slowly loses its practical meaning while keeping the mysterious and occult one. The city keeps the past engraved on gigantic tombs and stored in kaleidoscopic memory bottles: it creates the sense of belonging to the grand chain of time; it transcends the individual conception of a day, a month, a year. We exist in a history that goes beyond a single life. “I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”Not everything will pass into nothingness. 


Meriem Ben Mimoun



Photo credits: Meriem Ben Mimoun

Sources: 

  • ALLEAU René, De la nature des symboles, Paris, 1958

Rosalie .
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