The ghosts of Rome

The ghosts of Rome: an essay on what past inspiration, and the humanities, may still have to offer.

Caffè Piccarozzi, Piazza della Repubblica, across from the Baths of Diocletian and Michelangelo’s Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, 30.09.18

            Legends tell us that Rome is full of ghosts. Nero haunts the Piazza del Popolo; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who came here in 1786 and proclaimed Rome “the First City of the World,” likes to tug at the coats of passers-by in the Via del Governo Vecchio. The layers of history that fascinated Freud, the plethora of compressed symbols that transfixed Jung, these do not contain but rather express the spirits from its shadows.

Goethe, Villa Borghese, Rome. Photograph by the author

            Ghosts? you might say. In this secular age? Yet Italian bookstores advertise spiritual mysteries, with more volumes devoted to alchemy and masonry than to the Renaissance. And the churches too, despite their dwindling faithful, commemorate and celebrate the spirit world with reverent figures of unusual wonder, like the Bambinello in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, the little statue of a baby carved in Jerusalem olive wood that offers hope and healing to the sick. In 1798 the French Revolutionary troops occupying Rome tried to burn it, and others in 1848, again inflamed by secular passion, but each time it escaped, with patrons providing carriages for its travels to the infirm.

Bambinello, Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Photograph: Matthias Kabel

            The Bambinello – or a copia fedele, a faithful copy – is on the Capitoline Hill, next to the square that Michelangelo so gracefully designed and where the Roman government has its offices. The hills of Rome uphold their original political sway: the Quirinale is the place of the national government. These regiments of State and Church have sought to contain the restless energy of their people, if only to create more objects of fascination and contempt. For the solidity of their architectural monuments dominates the landscape, even as they are visibly subject to decay. Like the Baths of Diocletian, the monuments themselves, in their marble and masonry, are without life or spirit. They rely on other forces to animate them. Rome, to our good fortune, has cultivated architects whose artistry accommodated yet transcended their political masters, so that their creations, apparently lifeless, can yet convey the spirits in which they were made.

Michelangelo, Piazza del Campidoglio. Photograph by the author.

            On the benches in the small and unkempt Giardino del Quirinale sit couples young and old, and solitary souls; on its far side there is a small playground where Sunday children run among their parents. In the center stands a massive bronze statue of two carabinieri leaning headfirst into the wind. The inscription reads, Nei secoli fedele, 1814-2014. “Faithful through the centuries,” we might read when seeing this monument to the state police, whose headquarters too nearby watches over the government and its citizens.

Carabinieri in a Storm by Antonio Berti in Giardino del Quirinale. Photograph by the author.

            The statue of police on this ancient hill brings to mind the lives and sacrifices of its officers, yet also commemorates others absent, who, like the grass at these officers’ feet, exhibited life’s unruliness in their own existence. Political rules and religious rites, and the more modern mechanized order of urban life, and now the pocket comfort of computer technology: these do not ban the ghosts from Rome’s streets or from the inner lives of its inhabitants. They are present, should one be open to them.

            During this visit I encountered, unexpectedly, the ghost of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852). Gogol’s language has enlivened my thinking about the humanities, such as when he ironically contrasts literary and scientific education among the peasantry in Dead Souls. Gogol wrote Dead Souls in Rome, or at least the first part that survives. He made nine visits to Rome over ten years, often staying for months on end, frequenting the cafés (the Caffè Nuovo at Palazzo Ruspoli, now gone; or the Caffè Greco, still here but catering to the wealthy), and discovering other writers, such as the self-taught poet Giuseppe Belli, who passed out sheets of his sonnets at recitals in order to escape the clerical censors.

            In 1842, midway through his Roman decade, Gogol published his novella Rome. It traces the life of a young nobleman who leaves Rome for Paris, the city of modern enlightenment, technology, and politics. Paris and its civilized charms entrance the him, but two years there leave him enervated, and he makes his journey home through Marseilles and Genoa and over the Apennines. Rome, in contrast to Paris, appears to his eyes to be lost in the past, a ghost among the hard-edged glittering realities of nineteenth-century progress.

            But the nobleman walks the streets of Rome not with disappointment or nostalgia, but with a new sense of wonder. Amid the buildings of Bernini and Sangallo “he finally understood that only here, only in Italy does the presence of architecture become tangible, that art of austere grandeur.”¹ Studying in silence the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, “one penetrates to the depths with the soul into the secrets of painting – one matures, invisibly, in the beauty of spiritual thinking…. Because art raises humanity up to a great height, conferring nobility and prodigious beauty to the movements of the soul.” The thoughtful conversations he overhears on the Roman streets and in the cafés reveal, he discovers, people’s inner lives; these discussions, by contrast, “are supplanted in Europe by tedious social arguments and political poses that have banished from faces every expression of the heart” (91).

            He realizes, by immersing himself in Italy’s history and its art, that his country has been left behind on the global stage: it offers now memorials to the past and to its shadowed presence in the face of industrialized modernity. But then this past appears in full-blooded agency for the present: “with its very antiquity and ruins Rome still today rules the world, under the sign of a warning: like ghosts, these imposing architectural wonders have remained to rebuke Europe for its frivolous oriental luxury and its childish crumbling of thought” (101).

            Today, the ghosts remain and become animate under the mantle of beauty. They will always be there because, Gogol writes, our civilized, political world stands in need of beauty, grace, and inspiration. Will we come to see the humanities’ ghosts, which, in their discarded beauty, wait upon our willingness to endure a withdrawal from our diverting, modern lives, and sense more silently what escapes the traffic of common conversation?

Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, Rome. Photograph by the author.