There's no place like 'Rome'

ROME: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History, by Robert Hughes. Alfred A. Knopf, 498 pp., $35.

In June, I made my first-ever trip to Rome. I hired a knowledgeable guide to lead me through the Colosseum, the Forum and other ancient sites. I climbed the Spanish Steps and tossed a coin into the Trevi Fountain. I listened to a brass band in the Piazza Navona and sipped a negroni at a cafe in the Campo dei Fiori. I ate a delicious plate of bucatini all'Amatriciana in Trastevere, and navigated my way through the bountiful galleries of the Vatican Museum to the Sistine Chapel. I climbed to the roof of St. Peter's and took in a heart-stopping, panoramic view of the city.

I thought I'd had a pretty great time. But Robert Hughes, in his lively and opinionated book on the Eternal City, set me straight. Contemporary Rome, he says, "has been gutted by the huge and ruthless takeover of its imagination by mass tourism and mass media." It is "a city which, to a startling extent, seems to be losing touch with its own nature, and in some respects has surrendered to its own iconic popularity among visitors." At the Sistine, masses of tourists form a "degrading rugby scrum ... blocking your view and exasperating your desire for silence with their overheard comments, which are always a distraction, even if they are intelligent -- which they seldom are."

Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine until 2001, is not entirely jaded, and "Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History" is, happily, more occupied with the splendors of the past than the indignities of the present. In the prologue, the Australian-born writer recounts his own introduction to the city as a student in 1959. "Nothing exceeds the delight of one's first immersion in Rome on a fine spring morning," he writes. He sings the praises of the city's many fountains -- "speaking water" he poetically calls them -- and finds himself "thunderstruck" by architectural triumphs such as St. Peter's Square and its double Doric colonnade: "The idea of architecture of such scale and effort had never entered my mind before."

Not a work of travel literature or a comprehensive history, "Rome" is a selective, chapter-by-chapter tour through the ages -- "Pagans Versus Christians," "Renaissance," "High Baroque (Bernini, Boromini, Etc.)" -- animated by Hughes' well-chosen anecdotes and deft miniature portraits of emperors and artists, poets and popes.

Of the mad ruler Caligula (12-41 C.E.), Hughes observes: "What made life under Caligula especially difficult was that he expected to be applauded, not just by his courtiers but by the whole Roman public, as a great tragic-comic and sporting personality. ... Perhaps there is a touch of Caligula in every showbiz star."

The "tyrannous" Pope Sixtus V (1520-1590), who had a mammoth Egyptian obelisk hauled into St. Peter's Square and launched countless building projects, was "in some respects ... a terrifying figure; in others, an ignorant one; and in all ways, formidable. But he could never be reproached for either indecision or lack of creativity."

And the Renaissance painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) -- "saturnine, coarse, and queer" -- "thrashed about in the etiquette of early Seicento Rome like a shark in a net."

Unsurprisingly, Hughes is at his best when he's looking -- at buildings, paintings, sculptures. His discovery of a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campidoglio is a lesson in the "confluence of sculptural grandeur with intimacy of detail." In Poussin's neoclassical paintings of the 17th century, painted in Rome and now found in the Louvre and other museums, he notices that the "landscape lives and breathes, and looks as though nothing trivial can happen in it." Even the colors of Rome -- "the ruddy gray of tufa, the warm discoloration of once-white marble and the speckled, rich surface of the marble known as pavonazzo, dappled with white spots and inclusions like the fat in a slice of mortadella" -- are lovingly cataloged.

The cumulative effect of this prolonged rhapsody, of course, is to send first-time visitors such as myself flocking to Rome, to see with our own eyes what Hughes sketches so well. And thus, the tourist plague he crankily laments in the book's final pages. "But the glories of the remoter past remain," Hughes finally concedes, "somewhat diminished but obstinately indelible, under the dreck and distractions of overloaded tourism and coarsened spectacle. Like it or lump it, Rome is there; one cannot ignore it." Hughes' book itself is one long, elegant proof.

Ciao, Italia

Other recent titles of interest to Italophiles:

DANTE IN LOVE, by A.N. Wilson (FSG, $35). The noted English novelist and biographer presents a life of the Medieval poet from Florence, author of "The Divine Comedy."

CARAVAGGIO: A Life Sacred and Profane, by Andrew Graham-Dixon (Norton, $39.95). A biography of the great Renaissance painter notorious for his brief life of brawls, prostitutes and murder.

BERNINI: His Life and His Rome, by Franco Mormando (University of Chicago, $25). The first English-language biography of the devout Baroque sculptor and architect who designed St. Peter's Square and the elaborate fountain of Piazza Navona.

THE PURSUIT OF ITALY, by David Gilmour (FSG, $32.50). Gilmour (a scholar who is not in Pink Floyd) asks if the 19th century unification of Italy was a mistake, in this exploration of Italian life and politics.

EXCERPT: "Rome" by Robert Hughes

Although nobody can say when Rome began, at least there is reasonable certainty of where it did. It was in Italy, on the bank of the river Tiber, about twenty-two kilometers inland from its mouth, a delta which was to become the seaport of Ostia.

The reason no one can pinpoint when the foundation took place is that it never ascertainably did. There was no primal moment when a loose scatter of Iron and Bronze Age villages perched on hills agreed to coalesce and call itself a city. The older a city is, the more doubt about its origins, and Rome is certainly old. This did not prevent the Romans from the second century B.C.E. onward coming up with implausibly exact-looking dates for its origins: Rome, it used to be asserted, began not just in the eighth century but precisely in 753 B.C.E., and its founder was Romulus, twin brother of Remus. Here a tangled story begins, with many variants, which tend to circle back to the same themes we will see again and again throughout Rome's long history: ambition, parricide, fratricide, betrayal, and obsessive ambition. Especially the last. No more ambitious city than Rome had ever existed, or conceivably ever will, although New York offers it competition. No city has ever been more steeped in ferocity from its beginnings than Rome. These wind back to the story of the city's mythic infancy.

In essence, the story says that Romulus and Remus were orphans and foundlings, but they could claim a long and august ancestry. It stretched back to Troy. After Troy fell (the legendary date of this catastrophic event being 1184 B.C.E.), its hero Aeneas, son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite or Venus, had escaped the burning city with his son Ascanius. After years of wandering on the Mediterranean, Aeneas fetched up in Italy, where Ascanius (now grown up) founded the city of Alba Longa, not far from the eventual site of Rome, traditionally in about 1152 B.C.E.

Here, Ascanius' progeny began a line of kings, his descendants. The last of the line was called Amulius, who wrested the throne of Alba Longa from its rightful occupant, his elder brother, Numitor.

Numitor had one child, a daughter named Rhea Silvia. Amulius the usurper used his convenient, newly seized power to make her a vestal virgin, so that she could not produce a son, who might be not only Amulius's heir but also a deadly threat to him. But the war god, Mars, no respecter of either virginity or vestality, impregnated Rhea Silvia. Amulius, realizing she was pregnant, had Rhea Silvia imprisoned; presently she died of ill treatment -- but not before delivering her twin sons, Romulus and Remus.

We have the great historian Livy's word for what happened next. Amulius ordered his men to fling little Remus and Romulus into the Tiber. But the river had been in flood, and its waters had not yet receded. So, rather than wade right out into the current and get uncomfortably wet, they merely dumped the babies into the shallower floodwater at the river's edge, and went away. The level of the Tiber dropped some more, stranding the twins in the mud. In this state, wet but still alive, they were found by a she-wolf, which benignly nourished them with its milk until they were old and strong enough to be brought to adulthood by the royal herdsman Faustulus. (Most visitors, when they see the bronze sculpture in the Museo dei Conservatori of the Founding Babies sucking on the pendulous conical teats of the lupa, naturally think it is one original piece. It is not; the wolf is ancient and was cast by an Etruscan craftsman in the fifth century B.C.E., but Romulus and Remus were added c. 1484-96 by the Florentine artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo.)

In any case, in the myth they eventually overthrew Amulius and restored their grandfather Numitor to his rightful place as king of Alba Longa. And then they decided to found a new settlement on the bank of the Tiber, where chance had washed them ashore. This became the city of Rome.

Who would be its king? This was settled by an omen in the form of a flight of birds of prey. Six of them appeared to Remus but twelve to Romulus, thus marking him -- by a majority vote from the gods above, as it were -- as the indisputable ruler of the new city.

Where exactly was it? There has always been some disagreement over the original, "primitive" site of Rome. There is no archaeological evidence for it. It must have been on one of the Tiber's banks -- which one, nobody knows. But the district is famous for having had seven hills -- the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Caelian, the Aventine, the Esquiline, the Viminal, and the Quirinal. Nobody can guess which one it may have been, although it is likely that the chosen site, for strategic reasons, would have been a hill rather than flatland or a declivity. Nobody was keeping any records, so no one can guess which one of these swellings, lumps, or pimples was a likely candidate. "Tradition" locates the primitive settlement on the modest but defensible height of the Palatine Hill. The "accepted" date of the foundation, 753 B.C.E., is of course wholly mythical. There was never any possibility of authenticating these early dates -- of course nobody was keeping any records, and since later attempts at recording the annals of the city, all belonging to the second century B.C.E. (the writings of Quintus Fabius Pictor, Polybius, Marcus Porcius Cato), only began to be made approximately five hundred years after the events they claim to describe, they can hardly be deemed trustworthy. But they are all we have.

Supposedly, Romulus "founded" the city that bears his name. If things had gone differently and Remus had done so, we might now talk about visiting Reem, but it was Romulus who, in legend, marked out the strip of land that defined the city limits by hitching two oxen, a bull and a cow, to a plow and making a furrow. This was called the pomerium and would be the sacred track of the city wall. This, according to Varro, was the "Etruscan rite" for the founding of a city in Latium. Ritual demanded that the furrow, or fossa, the small trench of symbolic fortifications, should lie outside the ridge of earth raised by the plowshare; this ridge was called the agger or earthwork. The walls of the city were raised behind this symbolic line, and the space between it and the walls was scrupulously kept free of building and planting, as a defensive measure. The area within the pomerium would come to be called Roma quadrata, "square Rome," for obscure reasons. Evidently Remus took exception to it, for reasons equally unknown. Perhaps he objected to Romulus' assuming the right to determine the shape of the city. He showed his disagreement by jumping over the furrow -- an innocent act, one might think, but not to Romulus, who took it for a blasphemous expression of hostile contempt and murdered his twin brother for committing it. History does not tell how Romulus may have felt about slaying his only brother over a perceived threat to his sovereignty, but it is perhaps significant that the sacred group that ran around the pomerium at intervals to assure the fertility of Roman flocks and women in later years was known as the Luperci or Wolf Brotherhood.

So the embryo city, rooted in an unexplained fratricide, had one founder, not two, and as yet no inhabitants. Romulus supposedly solved this problem by creating an asylum or a place of refuge on what became the Capitol, and inviting in the trash of primitive Latium: runaway slaves, exiles, murderers, criminals of all sorts. Legend makes it out to have been (to employ a more recent simile) a kind of Dodge City. This can hardly be gospel-true, but it does contain a kernel of symbolic truth. Rome and its culture were not "pure." They were never produced by a single ethnically homogeneous people. Over the years and then the centuries, much of Rome's population came from outside Italy -- this even included some of the later emperors, such as Hadrian, who was Spanish, and writers like Columella, Seneca, and Martial, also Spanish-born. Celts, Arabs, Jews, and Greeks, among others, were included under the wide umbrella of Romanitas. This was the inevitable result of an imperial system that constantly expanded and frequently accepted the peoples of conquered countries as Roman citizens. Not until the end of the first century B.C.E., with the reign of Augustus, do we begin to see signs of a distinctively "Roman" art, an identifiably "Roman" cultural ideal.

But how Roman is Roman? Is a statue dug up not far from the Capitol, carved by a Greek artist who was a prisoner-of-war in Rome, depicting Hercules in the style of Phidias and done for a wealthy Roman patron who thought Greek art the ultimate in chic, a "Roman" sculpture? Or is it Greek art in exile? Or what? Mestizaje es grandeza, "mixture is greatness," is a Spanish saying, but it could well have been Roman. It was never possible for the Romans, who expanded to exercise their sway over all Italy, to pretend to the lunacies of racial purity that came to infect the way Germans thought about themselves.

Excerpted from "Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History" by Robert Hughes. Copyright © 2011 by Robert Hughes. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.