The Hands of Caravaggio (Roman diary 3)

Thick, heavy scaffolding completely conceals the broad façade of the most prominent, sacred building in Piazza di San Luigi dei Francesi. A raised platform leads to the makeshift-looking entrance on the right. When the church reopens at four in the afternoon, visitors seem to come in clusters and more frequently. As they flock into baroque interior, they bring with them the excitement of nearby Piazza Navona, their curiosity, fatigue, boredom, cameras and mobiles, turning the atmosphere inside to almost shambolic. Most of them don’t bother to slow down and re-adjust to the mood of the place; they walk freely around the central nave before joining a small crowd at the chapel to the left of the main altar. Its’s a church cum museum – now everybody must be certain they have reached their destination, the Contratelli Chapel, where three paintings by Caravaggio, three ‘must-see’ attractions are on show, all three in probably the most unfavourable display a painting can get. It’s hardly possible to see what the canvasses on the side walls depict, unless somebody is in the chapel, kneeling before the altar, but this position regular visitors are not granted to take. Instead, they cram at the barrier and raise their heads to the walls, awaiting another fifteen-second flash of light that illuminates the interior whenever somebody throws a coin into the box. Like a peepshow. It is the darkest, most puzzling canvas on the left wall that attracts most interest.

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hateful no humble

Is there any other kind of people worth my disdain as much as the teacher kind? Oh my, how I hold you in disdain.

Oh, my teacher, you who wakes up early in the morning, and wastes not a moment of a day to become. Who falls asleep early, but whose heart is on the lookout. Who lives in the mountains and feeds on honey and locust. Who has no syllabus and no desire to lecture. Who reads no Kant before he has read the everyday. Who has no disciples but a stray dog. Who casts fire and it burns. You got the love.

Oh teachers, how I hold you in disdain.

Keep Stendhal’s Syndrome at bay (Roman diary 2)

As I now remember, Dr Graziella Magherini, a psychiatrist at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, catalogued a psychiatric condition named Stendhal’s Syndrome. Well, I’ve known it for years – a mixture of dizziness, panic, paranoia and near madness caused by viewing certain historical places or by trying to see too many artistic artifacts in too short a time. Rome, of course, is the place that triggers this condition in an instance. Monday morning, on waking up, I wonder if on my sixth visit here I’m still bound to have those feelings of insatiable desire to know and see more, leading inevitably to boredom and frustration at the inadequacy of mind and senses unable to cope with all sorts of information overload. No, I’m not here to carry a guide and map, go round and see. I’ve half-heartedly vowed to myself not to. It should be an entirely different visit this time, the consequence of a conversation I had last autumn with a friend who asked made a seemingly simple question, an answer to which I didn’t seem to know and give then. A few weeks later I realised that to really find an answer to that question I would have to travel to Rome. Still, finding the answer, or its confirmation, I calculate, may take at most a couple of hours any day this week. A perverse mind game begins – What happens when my personal mission is completed? What do I do with the remaining six days? To resolve this banal dilemma I get out of the house – down the five marbled floors, to the bike (like at home, I even have my own bicycle shed by the lift) and off to town. I stop for another coffee and cornetto on the straight line up to Pincio.
Ever since I first put my foot on that hill the view has always belonged to me, as it did to armies of lovers oblivious to the world, disoriented tourists, inspired pilgrims, the suicidal, the Borghese, beggars, clergymen, fascists and communists alike … probably the most potent introduction to Rome that both Hollywood movie audiences and seasoned travellers learn to know before they descend into the urban labyrinth laid bare below. Looking over the morning haze, from the closest browns and terracottas of roofs, golds and bronze of church domes, dull grays of St Peter’s and the dark gapped comb of pine trees on the Janiculum Hill, the city looks surprisingly compact, unbelievably small to bear the weight of so much history. I don’t feel like being a tourist, I’m not anxious to explore all of this again, nor am I a pilgrim that mixes well with the digitally equipped crowds, religious or otherwise, to seek grace … One is a pilgrim on any path they enter.
Mmmhh … I notice the fading moon in the yet pale-blue sky and seem to know what to do with so much time on my hands offered to me in the heat of August. With no pre-plannned, assumed or expected roles, I can take any role that happens. Yesterday’s Via Appia escapade was an unmistakable hint in that direction. Any form of guidebook seems redundant not because I already know my ways about the city, but because Rome is the best possible place to get lost in. Wandering about is an ultimate adventure. I should love the circumstances – the blinding sun, the abundance of any imaginable food around, water miraculously trickling from wall fountains to quench thirst and rinse sweat off the face, coffee and sweets available at every whim to revive the body, wine to help mind cross the frontiers of language, the silence of obscure churches, the cooling shade of cloisters, sunlit marble to lie on and feel the heat radiate into the loins, friendly, grinning faces speaking syncopated melodies to the ear …
To really be in Rome for the rest of my stay I should disappear in it, let the city pull me into its fabric and dissolve.

I turn back from the panorama, mount the bike and let it lead me into the vast network of alleys around Villa Borghese gardens. The mood is timeless, everything is slightly neglected, as if half-forgotten. The greenery barely conceals ruins of ruins. Old men on the benches set in the niches of shrubs are already busy chatting. Sweets vendors rearrange their stock of cold drinks and baloons for more walkers to come. Runners pound up and down the paths. I pass a woman talking on her mobile while walking her dog. No, its not a dog. At the end of the leash her genuine, beloved sheep is nibbling at the surviving patches of grass. Fellini would have loved it.

From Heathrow to antiquity (Roman diary 1)

It didn’t take much to prepare – to unpack after the previous trip and repack again, keeping the number of items to a minimum, almost symbolic number, so few that my backpack could easily pass as hand luggage. What was most worrying was the prospect of a sleepless night as my flight to Rome was at 6am, and that meant either tossing about in bed and leaving the house at 3 anyway, or being a dozy, part-time nomad at the airport …
I took the last tube to Heathrow at 1 and an hour later found it strangely silent. In empty spaces – all counters and shops shut, no uniformed staff in sight – my own steps resonated on the vast floors. Suddenly the terminal felt grim and depressing. Quite a few passengers of the early morning flights seemed already well accommodated in the waiting hall, most of them sleeping, sprawled across two or three seats, lying in awkward vulnerable positions on the filthy carpet; new ones, laden with heavy intercontinental-style suitcases, emerging from the lift every now and then and swiftly joining in the rituals of night airport survival. Perhaps as ironic and unnerving entertainment, precisely at fifteen-minute intervals, taped female voices warned of any unattended luggage being removed and disposed of, in five languages in turn. At around 4, those most alert of the travellers started to leave sleepily and form a queue for the check-in. All heading for Rome. Soon, a bunch of black-clad young Orthodox Jews dispersed to seek semi-secluded places and began to wag and bow against walls in their morning prayer. Outside, distant lights of the first planes were descending from the brightening indigo sky.
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