Rome

I haven’t really got on with Rome so far. It's okay, but with every square I step into, every obelisk that rises up, I thank God the for the Renaissance, Florence and for Botticelli.

One phallic symbol after another, fountains ejaculating in turn, roads marching in formation, its like walking through one long pissing contest. Here is the world before Venus blew in on her seashell and it is desperate for a feminine touch.

A Garden of Gnomes

The Trevi Fountain is the first landmark I turn to and I guess it does provide some aesthetic respite. It is grand, mad and wonderfully Baroque. The sculpted white stone is elegant and there is a classical harmony about the design, but...it is preposterous. In the right context there is no doubt this is the most incredible fountain ever built, but sitting as it does, off a side street between some posturing Roman roads, it's like meeting God in the vegetable isle in Tescos. I like it because it is such an oddity, like a garden full of gnomes - its feels like Salvi was left to it and went mad halfway through. Is it Bellisimo? No.

The Colosseum

The Colosseum is awesome to approach and brings some substance to the clutter of ancient history and coffee shops. Its size and scope render the tourist bars and designer brands meaningless and its sheer monstrous ancientness gives it power over all the modern infrastructure that surrounds. It is humbling like the alpine mountains, here well before the roads, the shops, the flats and the millions who walk the pavements. What are you in your pitiful seventy years on earth? What do you mean in history?

On closer inspection though, it doesn’t have quite the same resonance. In fact, on a personal level it renders me as empty as a building site. Maybe it is too archaic, too old to relate...but I guess this it is a stadium rather than a work of art, for gladiators to fight and chariots to race and is stained with the end of the spear rather than the brush of a master.

I decide to run round it, one because I think that is cool, but also to appreciate in its correct context, and it works. Arches resound with cheers, walls shake with stamping feet and mouths salivate with impending violence. I recognise it. It is...it is the same feeling I have at every football stadium I have been to, and the reason I am not feeling more is because nothing has really changed. In two thousand years man still watches sport in gargantuan arenas. Up the road is the Stadio Olimpico. The first thing I saw in Milan was the San Siro. Two weeks ago I was running, with forty thousand others in the London Marathon. The blood-lust is more repressed but the competition is still similar. It is an important fact to remember. We change and evolve but much of us still remains the same. Our culture develops but our desires remain the same. The Colosseum may be the most ancient of constructions but it fuels the same basic urges – competition, anger, lust, tribalism.

The Bones of our Culture

The problem with Rome is derived from the intense regional differences of this country.

I am learning how important this is.

Because I am an outsider I do not see the difference in the people but I can feel the difference in atmosphere and ideology. It makes everywhere a distinct and new experience. Each place has to convey a strong sense of identity, and keep its other side somewhat hidden – dare it bear any similarity to those over the road. This is very important and very Italian, never hiding – always wearing your heart on your sleeve.

For Rome then this is about celebrating its time as centre of the Western World and maintaining this in the context of neighbours. With its phallic posturing it is as if the Florentine Renaissance never happened. Hence, if you want find art, it takes half an hour of walking through a not-very-well-signpost to find the Museum of Modern Art, although it is worth doing. The collection is wonderful – a lot of take on how Italian art is able to cope with its heritage – and a very interesting parallel to what it means to a Roman. It is difficult – there is so much here that is ingrained in our Western consciousness that it is hard to see anything fresh or different. Rome is the place to experience the foundation of culture, but not the place to view the final outcome. In order to experience...I don’t know, music, I want to go to the opera in Vienna, not see how the piano was made.

Bellisimo's Muse

Keats. How fitting it is to come across him on this journey. His final abode sits adjacent to the Spanish Steps of the Trinita Del Monte and I can feel his words caress the rosebeds:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

I want this stay with me, but to do this I need to leave Rome. It is an unpleasant modern tourist city built on the world's most interesting graveyard. Roses still grow but clamped between shrines of granite. I want to be where the star still shines.