Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch, Ch. XX
Our stay in Rome would be brief. We had traveled north from the Amalfi Coast, taking in Pompeii and then Tarquinia, where the Etruscans laid their dead to rest, before entering the Eternal City. Both of us were serious enough about making the most of our opportunities to have read up on the places we were going to. In my own peculiar case (for I am nothing if not peculiar), that included living for a while in Goethe's Italian Journey and Henry James's Italian Hours, which chronicle Goethe's experiences of 1786-8 and James's between 1869 and 1907. Through most of our own Italian journey I knew whereat I gawked, thanks mainly to the more conventional homework I had done. Then, heading into Rome and anticipating the Via del Corso, in or near which both Goethe and James had lodged and had found the Roman Carnival to be a bit much, I relished the prospect of a rendezvous with déjà vu. Of course it wouldn't be Goethe's Corso, nor yet James's; but it would be that very same strait of human currents. They two and we two would be ghosts in one another's Rome, though my wife would, I hoped, be the only one holding hands with me.
Like all Roman holiday-makers, we gravitated to the Piazza di Spagna and took our place in the vibrant throng at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Here was an end and a beginning. We were on our own, we were on foot, we were buoyed by waves of humanity, and we had perfect weather. It was not then one of Eliot's "kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand...," but an expansive spring day. Just the day for tramping over central Rome on a deplorably small budget of time.
Even Goethe, who had much more time, lamented that it wasn't enough. Instead of struggling against the impossibility of knowing Rome completely, he became a devotee of those places and things that moved him most.
The noble objects with which I am surrounded never lose their freshness for me. I did not grow up with them. I have not wrung from each its peculiar secret. Some attract me so powerfully that, for a while, I become indifferent, even unjust, to others. For example, the Pantheon, the Apollo Belvedere, one or two colossal heads and, recently, the Sistine Chapel have so obsessed me that I see almost nothing else.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer), 135
We must quickly find a particular Rome to be devoted to in after years. And so we tramped. We were by no means young even then, but on our days of hardy tramping we contend that there is youth after youth. There is, too, even where you might not expect to find it. Some writers, perhaps referring to personal experience or inferring from observation, mention the falling-away of passion in the course of a marriage as if it were inevitable. It is not. Social scientists who have made a study of the subject (how, I don't know) report that love in all its forms is not infrequently here to stay. One can in fact go on and on and on being electrified by a touch: this touch, and no other.
When we had ventured just a little way from the Piazza di Spagna, I looked up at a street sign and found that the view stretching out before us — a somewhat narrow street for a famous thoroughfare — was the Corso.
The Corso runs in a straight line from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Venezia. It is approximately 3500 paces long and lined with high and, for the most part, magnificent buildings The width bears no proportion to its length or to the height of the buildings. The pavements on both sides take up from six to eight feet, leaving a space between which in most places is not more than twelve or fourteen paces wide, barely sufficient for three carriages to drive abreast.
— Ibid., 447
Exactly. All that was missing from the sight before our eyes were the older forms of transportation and social pageant.
All through the year on [Sundays and holidays], the Corso is full of life. An hour or an hour and a half before sunset, the more eminent and wealthy Romans set out in their carriages in one long unbroken line and drive for an hour or more.
However, the annual Carnival carried festivity to a daunting extreme. (Goethe: "One has to see the Roman Carnival to lose all wish ever to see it again!") By James's time, it had become a codified riot.
It was advertised to begin at half-past two o'clock of a certain Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room across a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of tongues in the Corso. ... Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance; but their masks were of ugly wire, perfectly resembling the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof with the hood pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin scoops or funnels, with which they solemnly shovelled lime and flour out of bushel-baskets and down on the heads of the people in the street. They were packed into balconies all the way along the straight vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, gritty, unpalatable fog.
— Henry James, Italian Hours (Penguin Classics edition), 124-5
In our own time and season, the Corso was a scene of innocuous browsing. We enjoyed it for a while before striking out into a side street and then another and another. Before long, we were blissfully lost. I don't remember the side streets in any detail. I retain only a vague memory of convolution and quietude and softened light. There was nothing unpleasant about being lost. Not only were we going somewhere, which was the great thing, but each step along the way was a momentary destination. Every bit of it, after all, was Rome. At length, we came up behind a big, dingy building with an almost windowless curving wall. It suggested a roundhouse for locomotives, but this place was no rail yard. We kept on to the corner and emerged into a piazza filled with people admiring our big, dingy building: the Pantheon!
The view from the front is magnificent. For us, it was also a lesson in perspective: that what appears as dinginess from one angle can be seen as the mantle of history from another. Above all, one must remember that old buildings in Rome are not to be pigeonholed with old buildings in the junior cities of the world, even when stumbled upon from the rear.
In Rome the Pantheon, so great within and without, has overwhelmed me with admiration.
— Goethe, 123
During our whirlwind slog, we made it to the Forum, which boasts a certain oldness of its own, and managed to glimpse the Colosseum (also old) far down the street. However, getting lost and thus following Goethe's ghost to one of his favorite haunts was our great adventure. The Pantheon and the teeming Piazza della Rotonda in front of it, together with the quiet streets that brought us there, became our particular Rome.
Rome is a world, and it would take years to become a true citizen of it. How lucky those travellers are who take one look and leave.
— Goethe, 137
We count ourselves lucky in more than that. Time has brought us nearer to George Eliot's "kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand...," but we can still enjoy long rambles without flagging. The flaws in our health have not come to the fore, though we know of them and inevitably feel uneasy for each other on account of them. Imagining yourself as a ghost in other people's Eternal City helps you keep a sense of proportion, as to your life alone. But if it isn't a thing alone? Memories and prospects and worries and thanks must continue swirling around together, just possibly tending to wholeness.
