Ara Coeli and Campidoglio

It may be that Rome is no longer a capital city, but for an American abroad looking to see where he started from and also where he is, there is no city where the pang of things past seems so strongly the prong of things to come, where indeed it is possible to feel the American conscience taking new and premonitory shape. Looking homewards, here, one is taken aback, is adrift on the momentum of old forces, and gathers sudden way in the sea of old enterprise and new being. Rome, as Edwin Muir says, is the city of resurrection and of incarnation; in which the shapiness and the possibility of our world of cities make the embrace of shadows which may yet become real. Capital city or not, Rome is the city of all our survival in the midst of all our abandonment. There is in the Museum of the Capitol a stoic mosaic which is a comfortless reminder of all this: more or less of a negative x-ray (black with the bones in white) of a figure more or less reclining over (but not on) flames and spikes. Only his left elbow is at rest. His right hand points with a very extended fore-finger into another territory. No doubt he had been there once, but he will never go there again. He has ceased being an explorer, but he knows the role and the cry of exploration. He cannot accommodate what he learned there, but he wants you too to grasp the feel of disaccommodation. The territory is represented only by the imperative motto, in Greek: Know thyself! This is not Socrates up to his tricks; this is as far from Socrates as the Psyche can go, and there is no sort of trick about it. This is what Shakespeare saw in Lear: the poor bare spirit of unaccommodated man; and it is the constant nightmare of possessive and imaginative natures. This spirit is the creature told that he has become, or always was, responsible for his dreams. Looking at this image in memory, I hear also the sound of the bronze doors of Purgatory—alto and basso—in the Baptistry of John Lateran, and do not know whether I am shut in or shut out, or if I wish either. In Rome there are incarnations and resurrections over both shoulders. From Rome everything may be explored, and especially the Cities of Man’s Making. Rome is the vantage of conscience.

So Rome seemed in 1952 and 1953 and again more deeply in 1956 and 1957, a retort, and exploration, and a vantage of conscience; and it began to seem to me I had a permanent reservation in the Piazzi Ara Coeli, or at least a bench there (and in old pictures there are several benches, though only my spirit could find one available now) where I might look at the two flights of steps, one leading steeply up to the Church of Santa Maria of Ara Coeli, the other flowing widely down from the old Capitol. Cities of man climbing and flowing. Roman education is visual and massive, sharpened or distorted by historical focus and the history of private hopes construed somehow everywhere as the public monster lurking and shining within or beyond monument after monument, but always climbing or flowing, whether at Ara Coeli, the Pantheon (where sound itself is a kind of vision, echoing), at Tivoli (where all the waters in Italy flow to climb), at St. Peter’s or along the Via Veneto. Rome is no longer either a capital or a capitol but is full of the great forms. St. Peter’s is the Grand Hotel on the beach of Christianity, the Via Veneto of the Cross: style á la mode, the moving animal, the spectacle without final order which keeps one in immediate order—as in the great tide of people flowing towards the altar on St. Peter’s day at the time of Vesper mass, with Peter himself, not at all a rock, but all robed half benign and half uniform. And against this the flow of women on the Via Veneto at much the same hour, but every fair day; and altogether the thing here and the grace possible, resurrection and incarnation, with sinkholes, and gaps, and missing steps in flow or climb.