1950, half-way through a century, the twentieth century, and only a round dozen years into the twenty first, it seems so long ago. Robert Lowell opens his Life Studies on a train from Rome, the City of God, he calls it, to Paris. It’s 1950. O bella Roma! The stewards go by banging on gongs as the train traverses ‘the fallow Alpine snow’. I miss Rome – I am saying that. Simon Sebag Montefiori has been walking rather briskly round Rome these last three weeks on BBC4 giving us a rapid fire tour of Roman history; three thousand years in three hours. More often than not there seemed to be no connection with where he was in Rome to the content of his focus which added to his hurrying, left me feeling somewhat agitated or incredibly sleepy. Occasionally, of course, he was in the right place at the right time. Perhaps that didn’t matter, Rome, can always be beautiful as Lowell admits, O bella Roma!
Of course, if I happen to mention my feelings, at times painful longings, for Rome, she wonders why I don’t move there: what’s stopping you? And then, what are doing for Christmas?
This is going to be such fun, I think.
There are, needless to say, many reasons for not catching the next flight to Rome. Lowell talks of Pius XII defining the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption, ‘Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,/angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!’ That’s lovely, that gorgeous as a jungle bird. And then Lowell manages to jam Mary and Pius and the Swiss guards, against Caesar, and ‘The Duce’s lynched, bare, booted skull’. The violence of a power struggle, of maintaining power is never far away. Never far away from, in fact, from that love that we call the spiritual, ‘through the monstrous human crush’ as Lowell puts it. Before arriving in Paris, ‘our black classic’, he has to check out the Roman poets: Ovid, Lucan, Tacitus and Juvenal. Of course that’s what he is, or wants to be, a poet; somebody who does it with words. Neither an emperor nor a pope, merely a writer.
I don’t know what to say, I say to her, I think you should do what you have to do – it’s no longer anything to do with me. But I can’t move to Rome – not yet. I will give you your freedom for Christmas, how’s that? You no longer owe me anything and I guess from that way of thinking, I don’t owe you anything either. Quits! I want to laugh outrageously.
And as I remember Rome can be mucky, uncared for, outside the central touristy bits. One of my favourite bits being Garbatella.