Roman Holiday – DAY 1 – Fleeting Wor(l)ds

The Garden of the Vestals.

Monday. Lunedi. Lundi. It is the day of the Moon and I am standing, under the sun at its highest, above eternal lands.

I wander along Roman Empire’ s ruins and I am only thinking about the burning sun, about drops of sweat in my back. I am only thinking about my moist skin that cannot breathe so humid the atmosphere is.

I gaze at this row of stones and don’t see anything. Yesterday voices are deaf; they don’t speak to me, they don’t tell me stories. I know them by heart though. Jean Racine has shared them with me throughout Agrippine and Junia’s words, Shakespeare has told me more with Cleopatra’s heart. But myself lost in the crowd, but themselves surviving while empires have come and collapsed with their tyrans, those rumbles are only red and broken stones. Majestic, of course. Monumental, needless to say. Unbreakable, it seems. We don’t speak the same language though. In fact, like Latin, those rocks are like a dead sea and it is why their stories don’t lie in the ground anymore but with unclear words on explicative signs and in history books.

Of course I am impressed by this Coliseum still standing thousands of years later, but I can’t really be touched. No wild beasts’ roars, no hooray from the crowd, no courage from gladiators, only the Roman traffic’s horns and squeals still anachronistically haunt this monument’s vomitaria as it has become a vulgar roundabout. No need of praising us about trash when we entered, I think plastic bottles are not the main problem of this amphitheater surviving pollution everyday.

I keep going, curious and unmoved. Sounds finally fade away in the Roman Forum. Noise doesn’t break history anymore. May I began to travel ? Trees – pines, cypress alleys, lost in the middle of fall columns – weaken my impartiality, they talk about Italy. Not Roman Empire just yet, but I am getting there, I start to make one with the place. Quietly.
Then Saturne Temple’s eight columns and Venus’ nine other ones ring a bit more with my soul; mythology, planets’ chorus and astral symphony compose an opera for me to dance.

I then enter through the absence of a hidden door, la casa delle Vestali and I am assailed by my imagination’s nymphs. They are fleeing to sink into Trevi Fountain’s clear waters as Vestals’ prayers intertwine throughout my invented convent’s invisible columns.

Here it is, I am finally traveling; I am the barefoot Contessa of my own Roman legend.

The drapery starts to move, I forget about the heat, the thirst and the sweat. The drapery starts to move and the marble flesh starts to move with it. I get a glimpse of Vestals’ delicate princess walk. Because statues in marble always have delicate feet, haven’t you noticed? And perfect proportions as well, of course. But their curves are more or less generous depending on times, I could almost see my own body under one of them’s dress. Only one though. Others look like olive branches, like orange flowers. It doesn’t matter, marble is telling me a story, it moves me despite those mutilated statues’ waist.

We are suddenly women and we don’t care about all those men’s names that rose and fell. Augustus. Julius. Anthony. Nero. So many names. So many eras. We are suddenly and universally women, and even if nobody wrote epitaphs under their marble, their anonymous bodies has transcended the matter and are given to our hungry eyes for other myths.

However, Venus, who was then still called Aphrodite, doesn’t dance among Vestals, she retired in her iced palace, in her ivory tower. Away from the sun and time, breathing AC, Aphrodite doesn’t distill love potion anymore, Venus doesn’t watch her fallen temple’s encens anymore. Aphrodite doesn’t torture Pandora with painful desires that break your legs anymore, Venus doesn’t eat Vulcan’s, Mars’, Mercury’s, Bacchus’, Neptune’s, Anchise’s and Adonis’ hearts. Aphrodite, or is it Venus, proudly stands on her stone and her drapery’s marble is doomed to endless adoration. And her drapery’s marble makes immobile Vestals dance in their garden forever.

And her drapery’s marble moves me, travels me to Olympus… I am wearing my blue toge and my Roman shoes. I swim in cotton, I drink Gods’ hydromel; Neptune has left Venus’ perfect curves for mine and oceanically courts me. Then, I hear in the far harp’s music rising from the Earth in the Garden of the Vestals… It makes me dizzy, I can’t understand Neptune’s caring words anymore. My eyes get blury, grounds are suddenly so real under my feet. I am thus one of them, dancing under the Moon, Delphes prophetesses, pure and peaceful. I am thus one of the priestesses that inconstant Gods dream of convert to their pleasure of love, oblivious only those Virgins’ prayers keep them alive. I am thus the resurrected of one of those beheaded statues, and I pleasantly sink into their divine waltz.

« Scusa signorina, il parco archeologico sta chuidendo. »*

Already?

I am leaving, picking in between two red and broken stones, my dreams galvanized by Venus and her drapery’s marble.