罗马Rome

In mid-May we spent four days in Rome. The camera’s clock was still on California time, nine hours slow, and I only noticed on the second morning, so every photo from the first day and a half is stamped wrong: the Colosseum at seven in the morning says ten o’clock the night before.

A golden afternoon#

The first afternoon went to Santa Maria Maggiore. The sun came through the high windows in one solid beam; in a side aisle, a gilded angel stood with its hands together. At the center of another chapel, four bronze angels hold up a small gilded temple, and have been holding it since the end of the sixteenth century.

A short walk away is San Giovanni in Laterano, with MDCCXXXV carved into the pediment: seventeen thirty-five, which in this city counts as new.

A morning with nobody in it#

Out at seven the next day. Nobody in the streets, nobody at the Colosseum, the sun just reaching the top ring of stone. We walked a slow circle around it, then down the Via dei Fori Imperiali: the ruins sat in haze, the white bulk of the Altare della Patria at the far end.

Walking back, the little church in Monti had just caught the sun, and a bird passed over its cross.

We went into Santa Maria Maggiore again: ten to nine, and the gold of the apse mosaic was already lit.

The famous stones#

Inside the Colosseum you look up and there are arches behind the arches; on the rise next to it, the Temple of Venus and Roma is down to its brick core and a few columns.

In the Forum, the statues of the Vestal Virgins still stand in their own courtyard; the temple behind them has housed a church since the Middle Ages, its baroque front growing out from between the Roman columns. The temple and the church inside it are both still standing.

Built for God#

The third day, the Vatican. I had only ever seen St. Peter’s Square on television, mostly in Christmas broadcasts: the Pope at the window, the crowd below.

Strictly speaking, St. Peter’s is not even the cathedral of Rome (that would be the Lateran), but one step inside and you understand who it was built for: nothing here is built to human scale. The letters around the base of the dome are each more than a meter tall; the bronze canopy over the altar is nearly ten stories high.

Even the light here is arranged: it comes through an alabaster window with a dove at the center, then falls across gilded clouds and angels onto the throne. People kneel at the rail.

We walked out along the Tiber to the Sant’Angelo bridge. The angels up there have been holding their poses for three hundred years; a few more minutes of ours cost them nothing.

A palace to ourselves#

Toward closing time we turned into Palazzo Altemps, the smallest branch of the National Roman Museum. Four hundred years ago, cardinals brought excavated Roman statues into the rooms of this house; the statues never moved again, one to a room, the windows their only light. Apart from the attendants, we nearly had it to ourselves.

The last day#

Early out to San Paolo fuori le Mura; the name is the address, St. Paul’s outside the walls. Paul is buried under the altar. Half past eight, and nobody else in the courtyard.

At noon we stopped back at the hotel. The Romeo is a sixteenth-century palazzo redone by Zaha Hadid’s studio. A red grand piano is parked in the lobby; it occurred to me that it was probably the youngest thing we had seen all week 😂 The collision was deliberate: digging during the renovation turned up the remains of a two-thousand-year-old Roman workshop, now preserved under the glass floor of the swimming pool.

The Pantheon came last.

The only light inside falls through the round opening at the top of the dome, with no glass in the opening. It lands on the columns and moves a little every few minutes.

On the way out I checked the camera. This time it was right.